A comprehensive intellectual biography of the great democratic theorist and activist. Westbrook (History/Univ. of Rochester) traces Dewey's remarkable 70-year career with painstaking emphasis on his philosophy and politics, mentioning life circumstances only as they influenced his writings and social reform. Dewey (1859-1952) devoted his life, Westbrook remarks, to the construction of a persuasive philosophical argument for the conviction that ``democracy is freedom,'' and ``the pursuit of an activism that would secure its practical realization.'' He fought for an ethics of associated living, ``a society in which the good of each was the good of all and the good of all was the good of each.'' The book is divided into four time-periods, according to stages, not only of the development of Dewey's ideas of democratic reform, but of the social and political milieu in which he sought to implement them. Westbrook's tone is reverential, criticizing his subject only for a rare lapse or inconsistency of judgment, such as Dewey's support of Woodrow Wilson's decision to have the US enter WW I. Otherwise, Westbrook attempts, and largely succeeds, to reinterpret Dewey's writing, despite the ``lack of precision and clarity.'' His scholarship is definitive, and he succeeds in defending Dewey's work against most of his important critics, and reminding us that Dewey's concerns and ambitions are still relevant to today's world. A must for serious students of American politics, history, or philosophy, but not likely to create much of a stir outside the academic community. (Five illustrations—not seen.)
Pub Date: June 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-8014-2560-3
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Cornell Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1991
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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