With eloquent sobriety and restraint, this biography of the Dutch-Jewish thinker whom Bertrand Russell called “the most lovable of the philosophers” communicates much of its subject’s rarefied spirit. Though many tomes have been written on Spinoza’s thought, little has been published on his life, because, as Nadler (Philosophy/Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison) observes, most of his revealing personal letters were destroyed after his death. Accordingly, apart from sections on the long-known facts of Spinoza’s existence, especially the Amsterdam Jewish community’s infamous excommunication of him in1656, much of this biography’s mood is appropriately subjunctive: Spinoza may have known his contemporary Rembrandt; must have been amused by the Jewish fervor over the messianic pretender of his day, Shabbetai Zvi; and probably did not represent the Dutch government to the French, as has sometimes been claimed, during the Franco-Dutch war of the 1670s. Two facts convincingly deduced by Nadler about Spinoza are that he never studied for the rabbinate and that some of Amsterdam’s Jews continued to associate with him even after his excommunication. But, like 17th-century Netherlandish paintings, the strength of this study is its contextual details, as in the several pages devoted to discussing the Dutch craze for speculative investment in tulip bulbs imported from Turkey (the famously Dutch flower was not native to Holland) and its likely impact on the Spinoza family’s fortunes. The faint outlines of Spinoza’s life take on a brighter color against the backdrop of Nadler’s rich evocations of the tensions between Amsterdam’s Ashkenazic and Sephardic Jews, Calvinist and Remonstrant Christians, and Orangist and De Wittian statesmen. The stories of Spinoza’s friendships with other intellectual luminaries of the day, such as Leibniz, Christiaan Huygens, and Robert Boyle, are retold in the context of this lively social and political history. Spinoza, so often sainted or demonized, at last receives a fine, measured biography. (11 photos, unseen)
Pub Date: April 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-521-55210-9
Page Count: 350
Publisher: Cambridge Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
