A highly readable examination of two influential, but often overlooked, thinkers of the early Enlightenment.
An exploration of how a pair of great philosophers, “one . . . the ultimate insider, the other a double exile,” impacted both their own time period and ours.
The author begins with and pivots upon the meeting of Baruch de Spinoza and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, two of the most notable wunderkinder of 17th-century Europe, at Spinoza’s home at The Hague in 1676. From that point of departure, Stewart discusses each man in alternating chapters, beginning with their childhoods and moving forward through their troubles and accomplishments, leading up finally to their brief association with one another. Having covered Spinoza’s death, Stewart charts the further development of Leibniz’s thinking, with an emphasis on Spinoza’s influence. Stewart’s thesis is two-fold. First, he wants to demonstrate the importance Spinoza had upon the thought and philosophy of his younger counterpart, Leibniz. Second, he attempts to ground much of philosophical and, indeed, world history since the Enlightenment in these two personages. Spinoza’s ideas, though popularly reviled in his day, were the basis of classical liberalism and much of our modern scientific outlook. Leibniz, in contrast, formed the basis for the conservative religious community’s response to modernism. The concept of God, and how that concept shaped, and was shaped by, each man’s philosophical arguments, is a central theme here. Stewart makes accessible the many philosophical ideas presented, and he brings the men to life with descriptions of everything from their eating habits to their priorities in daily life.
A highly readable examination of two influential, but often overlooked, thinkers of the early Enlightenment.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-393-05898-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2005
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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