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 book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he...
The latest from French writer/filmmaker Carrère (My Life as a Russian Novel, 2010, etc.) is an awkward but intermittently touching hybrid of novel and autobiography.
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he describes powerfully. Carrère and his partner, Hélène, then return to Paris—and do so with a mutual devotion that's been renewed and deepened by all they've witnessed. Back in France, Hélène's sister Juliette, a magistrate and mother of three small daughters, has suffered a recurrence of the cancer that crippled her in adolescence. After her death, Carrère decides to write an oblique tribute and an investigation into the ravages of grief. He focuses first on Juliette's colleague and intimate friend Étienne, himself an amputee and survivor of childhood cancer, and a man in whose talkativeness and strength Carrère sees parallels to himself ("He liked to talk about himself. It's my way, he said, of talking to and about others, and he remarked astutely that it was my way, too”). Étienne is a perceptive, dignified person and a loyal, loving friend, and Carrère's portrait of him—including an unexpectedly fascinating foray into Étienne and Juliette's chief professional accomplishment, which was to tap the new European courts for help in overturning longtime French precedents that advantaged credit-card companies over small borrowers—is impressive. Less successful is Carrère's account of Juliette's widower, Patrice, an unworldly cartoonist whom he admires for his fortitude but seems to consider something of a simpleton. Now and again, especially in the Étienne sections, Carrère's meditations pay off in fresh, pungent insights, and his account of Juliette's last days and of the aftermath (especially for her daughters) is quietly harrowing.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9261-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
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