A fine biography that leaves few leaves unturned, and that should revive interest in Koestler’s work.
The first major biography in a quarter-century of Arthur Koestler (1905–83), today best known for the anti-Soviet novel Darkness at Noon (1940).
Scammell (Writing/Columbia Univ.; Solzhenitsyn: A Biography, 1984), translator of Nabokov, Solzhenitsyn and Tolstoy, among others, has a handful of a subject in Koestler, who roamed continents and disciplines and gave new dimensions to the term “intellectual outlaw.” He was “Hungarian in his temper, German in his industry, Jewish in his intellectual ambition…[and] never comfortable in his own skin, doomed to oscillate between arrogance and humility.” Zelig-like, Koestler was everywhere at once, it seemed, throughout the most important episodes of the 20th century. He interviewed Sigmund Freud, carried documents that implicated the Nazis in the collapse of Republican Spain, hung out with Timothy Leary and Wernher von Braun, palled around with terrorists and Hollywood screenwriters and was known to Stalin, Churchill, Roosevelt, Hitler and Mussolini. Amid all that, he found time to write a half-dozen novels, countless articles and other books, growing improbably more prolific as he grew older. Scammell is more admiring of Koestler than other biographers (such as Iain Hamilton), who have ranked him as a middling novelist and willfully ignorant pop scientist. Yet Scammell somewhat wearily writes, after recounting Koestler’s championing of the Israeli magician/charlatan Uri Geller, “he pursued the grail of proving extrasensory perception to the end of his life, regardless of what the majority of his contemporaries (and his public) thought.” In this elegant biography, Scammell shows a troubled and sometimes troubling soul with an almost stereotypically meddlesome mother—“Don’t you have even a single nice memory of your childhood and youth?” she once demanded of him—and plenty of demons, susceptible to quack theories and big ideas. But he also generated big ideas for their own sake, led the life of the independent intellectual to the hilt and essentially lived as he wished.
A fine biography that leaves few leaves unturned, and that should revive interest in Koestler’s work.Pub Date: Dec. 29, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-394-57630-5
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2009
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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