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
Well-told and admonitory.
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
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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