A generalist brings together three fields—philosophy, religion and art—often kept separate.
“A small, intimate portrait” illustrating the biography of René Descartes and his ideas.
Nadler (Philosophy/Univ. of Wisconsin; A Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza's Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age, 2011, etc.) believes that Descartes “belongs as much to the intellectual culture of the Dutch Golden Age as he does to the grand history of Western philosophy whose development he so strongly influenced.” Feeling politically constrained in France, Descartes moved to Holland to work, but his philosophy aroused controversy and opposition in Dutch universities as well. Nadler situates the French philosopher's life in its Dutch context and frames the narrative with an investigation into a few portraits of Descartes. One was supposedly painted by Frans Hals and is in Copenhagen. The author demonstrates that there may be a possibility that one of Descartes’ friends commissioned the portrait from Hals as a memento prior to the philosopher's 1649 departure on a visit to the queen of Sweden. This would have been from the period he lived in the village where he wrote the Discourse on Method and Principles of Philosophy. The friend was the Catholic priest Augustijn Alsten Blomart, who lived in the city of Haarlem, just south of Descartes' country-village home. Blomart, as Nadler shows, was well-integrated into contemporary Dutch literary, artistic, scientific and political circles. Hals also lived and worked in Haarlem. Nadler discusses the extant portraits of the philosopher, as well as their provenance and what is known of the context in which they were produced. He also provides a chronological summary of Descartes’ philosophical works in relation to their Dutch context.
A generalist brings together three fields—philosophy, religion and art—often kept separate.Pub Date: April 21, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-691-15730-6
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2013
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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