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
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
Her biographer, James Westcott, once said: “every time she tells a story, it gets better,” and one can’t help but wait in...
Legendary performance artist Abramovic unveils her story in this highly anticipated memoir.
When she was growing up, the author lived in an environment of privilege in Yugoslavia, which was on the verge of ruin. Her parents, two fervent communist partisans and loyal officers during Josip Broz Tito’s rule, were not the warmest people. Abramovic was put under the care of several people, only to be taken in by her grandmother. “I felt displaced and I probably thought that if I walked, it meant I would have to go away again somewhere,” she writes. Ultimately, she carried this feeling of displacement throughout most, if not all, of her career. Many remember The Artist Is Present, her 2010 performance at the Museum of Modern Art in New York during which she sat in front of museumgoers for 736 hours, but her work started long before then. As a woman who almost single-handedly launched female performance art, the author has spent the better part of her life studying the different ways in which the body functions in time and space. She pushed herself to explore her body’s limits and her mind’s boundaries (“I [have] put myself in so much pain that I no longer [feel] any pain”). For example, she stood in front of a bow and arrow aimed at her heart with her romantic and performance partner of 12 years, Ulay. She was also one of the first people to walk along the Great Wall of China, a project she conceived when secluded in aboriginal Australia. While the author’s writing could use some polishing, the voice that seeps through the text is hypnotizing, and readers will have a hard time putting the book down and will seek out further information about her work.
Her biographer, James Westcott, once said: “every time she tells a story, it gets better,” and one can’t help but wait in anticipation of what she is concocting for her next tour de force.Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90504-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Crown Archetype
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
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