In this second of his projected three-volume biography of Rousseau (Jean-Jacques, 1983), Cranston (Political Science/London School of Economic) continues his dry and detailed reconstruction of Rousseau's life from primary sources. Here, Cranston starts with his subject's flight for Paris, covering his life as a guest on prosperous country estates, the completion of his most important work, and his escape from arrest for impiety and sedition. Rousseau's life, as Cranston shows, illustrates the Frenchman's own thesis-that ``Man is born free but is everywhere in chains''-as Rousseau himself was imprisoned by the contradictions in his own personality. In Julie, or the New Heloise, Rousseau explored his fantasies of virtuous love, while he repeatedly betrayed his lifelong mistress and engaged in petty flirtations with married women. Self-educated and a writer, Rousseau, in Emile, advocated a system of education that denigrated books, and he idealized both the tutor and the child although he abandoned his own five children in a Paris orphanage. And, even while enjoying the patronage of an aristocratic family in his own little chateau, he wrote the Social Contract, attributing all social evils to the wealth and privilege he was enjoying. For all his high-mindedness, Rousseau, Cranston demonstrates, was the ``noble savage,'' quarrelsome, ill-manned, suspicious, tyrannical, jealous, ``devoured'' by the need to love and be loved, contemptuous of his patron's courtesies but easily offended and complaining if they neglected him. While Cranston's method may indeed ``break the chain of books based on books,'' his restricting himself to primary sources, avoiding interpretation or analysis or style, psyche, milieu, even historical and social context, severely limits the value of this biography, however illuminating his analysis of the writings.
Pub Date: May 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-226-11863-0
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Univ. of Chicago
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1991
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
