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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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