Monk’s generally negative portrait may alienate the great man’s devotees, but it’s the product of meticulous research and...
An outstanding conclusion to the story begun in Bertrand Russell: The Spirit of Solitude, 1872–1921 (1996): the tragedy of a brilliant but flawed thinker who mistreated the humans closest to him while promoting humanity in the abstract.
Monk is an exceptional biographer of philosophers, able to interweave clear analysis of abstruse notions with compelling personal narrative. Here he takes Russell from first-time fatherhood at age 49 to death at 97. Celebrated for his earlier work on logic and the philosophy of mathematics, Russell enters these pages fallen from intellectual grace because he abandoned academia for a more lucrative career as a freelance writer and lecturer on social and political topics about which he has no special expertise. Self-confessedly “past his best” at logic, he enjoyed the money and notoriety he got as an advocate of atheism, adultery, socialism, and “scientific” education. Not only is much of this work, in Monk’s view, “sloppy and ill-considered,” it fails dismally in practice, as Russell and his second wife free-love their way into a nasty divorce and their self-started progressive school leaves his son with emotional scars. In the US during the 1930s and ’40s, and back in England afterward, Russell keeps getting more famous: he returns to academic philosophy; becomes a “cause célèbre of . . . academic freedom”; wins the 1950 Nobel Prize in literature; emerges as a champion of nuclear disarmament and, half-wittingly, of Che Guevara. The darker private story concerns Russell’s solipsistic disregard for others and his well-founded fear of the family strain of madness. The result: a “long trail of emotional wreckage” including three divorces, an insane son, and two insane granddaughters. Ironically, his daughter Kate achieves happiness when she defies her father and converts to Christianity.
Monk’s generally negative portrait may alienate the great man’s devotees, but it’s the product of meticulous research and balanced by the biographer’s esteem for a great intellect and outsized personality. (illustrations not seen)Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7432-1215-0
Page Count: 680
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2001
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 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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