Unlikely to find much readership outside of the psychoanalytic hardcore.
Psychobiography meets psychiatric case study in this life of the eminently strange theorist.
Wilhelm Reich (1897–1957) was, writes Corrington (Theology/Drew Univ.), one of the most brilliant of Sigmund Freud’s epigones, a thinker who managed to make sexuality even more central to psychoanalytical theory than the master envisioned or intended. Reich, however, also concocted theories that, far from being merely radical, come up on the other side of bizarre: the quackish “orgone box,” which purported to capture what Corrington calls “a new form of massless energy,” a notion that Albert Einstein roundly dismissed, but that certain strands of New Agers have sworn by ever since; equally quackish anticancer therapies that eventually landed him in jail; the repeated assertion, toward the end of his life, that “the more genital potency a person has, the more of nature and its laws he or she will see.” Though Reich wrote such once influential and still timely books as The Mass Psychology of Fascism and The Function of the Orgasm, he is condemned and forgotten today, considered by some to be an unfortunate victim of paranoid schizophrenia. Corrington’s civilian effort (he is a philosopher, not a physician) to champion Reich as an unduly overlooked revolutionary thinker is valiant but ultimately unconvincing; no amount of explaining away can make Reich’s self-identification with Christ or tinkering with pseudoscience any more palatable, and Corrington’s attempts to suggest that “orgone energy” is at least a possibility (“how can we know something that has no real contrast term or reality”) will make any rationalist smirk. Perhaps without meaning to, Corrington manages to assemble plenty of evidence along the way that Reich had come unhinged somewhere in the course of a tormented and fearful life. In the end, his portrait of the Austrian thinker will probably not convert many to Reich’s cause—but may instead provoke pity and sympathy over talents wasted and bridges burned.
Unlikely to find much readership outside of the psychoanalytic hardcore.Pub Date: July 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-374-25002-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2003
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 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
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