Kaufmann’s own self-requiem says it all: “There was nothing left in him; he did not spare himself; he put everything he had...
Luminous biography of the noted philosopher and intellectual historian best known for his work on Friedrich Nietzsche.
Walter Kaufmann (1921-1980) died too young, but not before having written numerous books that shifted the landscape of the humanities. Corngold (Lambent Traces, 2004, etc.), a noted interpreter and translator of the work of Franz Kafka, takes on Kaufmann’s books one after the other, “mainly keeping to one side the foreknowledge of what he was still to write.” The most influential of them was his first, in which Kaufmann, a German Jew, rehabilitated the reputation of Nietzsche, badly marred through association with Nazism. His 1950 book Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist not only helped rescue Nietzsche from that guilty stain, but also spurred a postwar renaissance in studies of Nietzsche; no book in the time since, Corngold ventures, has appeared that has not in some way reckoned with Kaufmann’s. Corngold is not uncritical. He notes that Kaufmann’s own Nietzschean devotion to self-mastery colored his perception of Nietzsche’s “will to power” and in turn “sanitizes Nietzsche”; Kaufmann’s view may have been overly apolitical, but it also helps restore the idea of the Germany “that Jews dreamt of in their assimilationist craving, the dream of the haskalah.” Kaufmann would emerge as a powerful critic of religion (whence the heretic of the subtitle) and student of world literature and history, taking on the theologies and works of Luther, Plato, Milton, Aeschylus, and countless others while waging his own war “against decrepit ideas.” In that pursuit, no book went unread, and though Kaufmann was a man of action, this biography is one of ideas and the presupposition that readers are prepared to take on a big slice of intellectual history in considering them.
Kaufmann’s own self-requiem says it all: “There was nothing left in him; he did not spare himself; he put everything he had into his work, his life.” But he did not find time to reckon fully with his own legacy, and in that, Corngold provides a valuable service.Pub Date: Dec. 11, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-691-16501-1
Page Count: 760
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2018
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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