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PUSHING TIME AWAY

Name: PUSHING TIME AWAY
Author: Peter Singer
ISBN: 0-06-050131-6

MY GRANDFATHER AND THE TRAGEDY OF JEWISH VIENNA

by Peter Singer ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2003

A compelling look at a modest figure in the Freud-Adler controversy.

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A moving biography of classical scholar David Oppenheim by his grandson, eminent philosopher Singer (Rethinking Life and Death, 1995, etc.).

As a 23-year-old classics student at the University of Vienna in 1905, Oppenheim feared that he had chosen a field of study in which he could not do work of real value. In 1906, he married Amalie Pollak, one of a handful of female students at the university, and began teaching classics at a Vienna high school. By a stroke of luck, he was invited to participate in a weekly seminar in Sigmund Freud’s apartment; by 1910, he was coauthoring a monograph on dreams in folk tales with Freud and was an active member of the Vienna Psychoanalytical Society. When another member of the society, Alfred Adler, was forced to resign as chairman because of his escalating disagreements with Freud, Oppenheim chose to support Adler and placed in jeopardy the greatest scholarly opportunity he ever got. (The coauthored monograph was not published during his lifetime.) Becoming an active member in Adler’s group, the Society for Free Psychoanalytical Research, Oppenheim published extensively even when drafted to the eastern front in 1914. He came home to his wife and daughter in 1918 shell-shocked, wounded, and exhausted from war. Returning to teaching and lecturing, he saw Adler’s organization falling prey to the same “cult of personality” as Freud’s. Devastated, he withdrew from the society and never published again, directing all of his energies toward his students. But after the Nazis annexed Vienna in 1938, David was not allowed to set foot in the school where he had taught for 30 years. The Oppenheims tried unsuccessfully to follow their daughter to Australia, but they were instead transported to Theresienstadt. David died there in 1943; Amalie survived and emigrated to Australia in 1946. Focusing primarily on his grandfather, Singer also follows the extended Oppenheim family, and paints a many-layered portrait of intellectual life in Vienna.

A compelling look at a modest figure in the Freud-Adler controversy.

Pub Date: March 1, 2003

ISBN: 0-06-050131-6

Page Count: 272

Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2003

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HISTORICAL & MILITARY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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ETHICS IN THE REAL WORLD
by Peter Singer

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FAMINE, AFFLUENCE, AND MORALITY
by Peter Singer

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THE LIFE YOU CAN SAVE
by Peter Singer

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Well-told and admonitory.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)