A rich, intellectually meaty history.
Life inside the 20th-century’s reigning citadel of pessimism, as told through the lives and (often conflicting) philosophies of its key thinkers.
Longtime Guardian cultural critic Jeffries (Mrs. Slocombe's Pussy: Growing Up in Front of the Telly, 2000) provides an in-depth, decade-by-decade overview of one of the 20th century’s most significant think tanks. Founded in 1923, the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research was the domicile of critical theory, “the kind of radical rethinking that challenges what it considers to be the official versions of history and intellectual endeavor.” The leading lights were all about revolt, both in rejecting the bourgeois world of their parents and in breaking down traditional forms of art. Walter Benjamin latched on to Dada, surrealism, and the advent of film montage; Theodor Adorno hailed Arnold Schoenberg’s 12-tone technique and Bertolt Brecht’s experimental theater. On both the political and cultural fronts, the Frankfurt School was also an ivory tower from which to observe the final collapse of capitalism, with communism rising from the ashes. History, of course, played havoc with their every plan, which didn’t mean rejecting Marxism so much as constantly subjecting it to critical review. This history of the Frankfurt School, then, becomes very much a history on the evolution of Marxism over the past century, as Frankfurt philosophers who started out trying to overthrow society soon found themselves trying to change it from within. New questions surface: what does class struggle mean when the middle class (at least) has two cars, a TV, and a mortgage? Is consumerism a new kind of enslavement altogether? By the 1960s, Herbert Marcuse, one of the school’s leading figures, was a New Left hero; Adorno, by contrast, had become their villain. After 9/11, Jürgen Habermas, one of the school’s leading theorists, was actually embracing religion. Throughout the book, Jeffries demonstrates that he is comfortable and conversant with the often thorny philosophical ideas of his subjects.
A rich, intellectually meaty history.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-78478-568-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Verso
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2016
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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