by Ray Monk ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2001
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
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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