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
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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2026 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.
