A singular achievement of intellectual history as well as a weighty entertainment.
Crossing the divide between academic analysis and insightful storytelling, this social and intellectual history explores the ideas of pragmatism by charting the lives of its founding fathers.
Pragmatism, a philosophy that makes experience the decisive test of truth and rightness, has experienced a renaissance after the chill of Cold War decades, and Menand, a New Yorker staff writer and eminent scholar, counts as one of its latter-day midwives. Significantly, then, we are told that pragmatism (with its Emersonian overtones) came into being as a radical, progressive critique of the various philosophies that fueled the American Civil War. Pragmatism’s early proponents looked upon scientific or religious belief as “one of the pieces people try to bundle together with other pieces, like moral teachings and selfish interests and specific information, when they need to make a decision.” It was, therefore, a philosophy of method and process, of probability and function, and (when imbued with a constructive skepticism) it created common ground for cultivating democracy and pluralism over ideology. In his sharp and expansive appreciation of pragmatism’s formative quartet (Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, and John Dewey), Menand brings their intermingled lives into colorful focus: Holmes goes to war, James to Brazil, Peirce becomes homeless, and Dewey helps organize the American Association of University Professors. Each takes center stage in one of the story’s first four sections, forming a sequence of eclectic biographies that accumulate a narrative tension as lives and ideas cohere or clash. A fifth section measures pragmatism’s limitations as well as its role in modernizing American thought: it cannot, for example, explain why someone would be willing to die for his beliefs, but it represents the “intellectual triumph of unionism.”
A singular achievement of intellectual history as well as a weighty entertainment.Pub Date: May 23, 2001
ISBN: 0-374-19963-9
Page Count: 518
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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