Self-loathing may or may not be the meaning between-the-lines of Sartre's writings; narcissism, however, seems the very crystallization of Simone de Beauvoir's. It's a peculiar sort of narcissism , the narcissism of the femme savante, usually referred to (by the one who possesses it) as unremitting honesty: the confessional of the intellectual, or a look in the mirror, without makeup, under the harshest light. It's other things, too: for instance, Camus'— "The sore that is scratched with such concern finally becomes a source of pleasure"—but then de Beauvoir doesn't like Camus.... This is the final volume of her autobiographical trilogy. The first explored her bourgeois rebellion; the second, the university years, the early Sartre relationship, the War; now, the past decades, from the Liberation to the present. It concludes a major work, major in that it gives us both a representative existentialist sensibility, and a behind-the-scenes picture of an age. Typically, the style's uneven; the thinking (especially the jumbled versions of certain aspects of Sartre's philosophy) embarrassing; and the disclosures about herself or other equally famous figures (poor Koestler....) rather antipathetic, self-regarding, one-sided. Everything has a tendency to slip out of gear: at one stretch the tempo is slipshod, then funereal; the tone ranges from the crisp to the lyrical, from the weary to the carping. Like Sartre, she came to political consciousness somewhat late in life; like him, she has certainly made up for it. History is Big Sister here, permeating all reactions: the revolving door maneuvers with the Communists, the positions taken vis-a-vis Korea, Algeria, Cuba, even her affaires de coeur. Indeed, how she reconciles ideological determinism with personal freedom (the book's truest touches, incidentally, concern drugs, compulsion- neuroses, thanatophobia) is certainly a triumph of sorts: one of the most significant solipsistic acts of the century. It is also a story which in its determined self-exposure has fascinated many and will continue to do so again.
Pub Date: June 15, 1965
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1965
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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