Although a bit dry in places, this is a rich, nuanced guide to a complex and tortured man.
A comprehensive biography of the philosopher who famously wrote that “God is dead!...And we have killed him.”
Novelist and biographer Prideaux (Strindberg: A Life, 2012, etc.) portrays the German author Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) as a writer desperately in search of an audience. His father was a Lutheran pastor, and Nietzsche believed he would become one, too. He was “unusually sensitive to music” and composed throughout his life. By the age of 12, he said, he started to “philosophise,” and he went on to become one of the youngest to receive a professorship at Basel University. Schopenhauer’s work was an early influence, but Richard Wagner, whom he first met in 1868, and his wife, Cosima—whom Nietzsche had a crush on—inspired him greatly. His closest female friend was his sister, Elisabeth. Prideaux chronicles in detail their often rocky relationship and how, after Nietzsche’s death, she rewrote his works, infusing them with her anti-Semitism, garnering Hitler’s enthusiastic approval. In 1872, Nietzsche published his first book, The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, which Prideaux describes as an “impassioned attack on the cultural degeneration of his day.” She does a fine job of explaining how Nietzsche’s nihilistic philosophy developed, book after book—most self-published—while the texts grew briefer and more aphoristic. She dramatically reveals a man obsessed with writing. After finishing Twilight of the Idols, he began The Will to Power the next morning. Prideaux also describes in detail his lifelong battles with severe headaches and eye problems. Finally, there’s her sad figure of an itinerant man still writing and dejectedly carrying around with him his entire wardrobe of personal possessions. Prideaux notes that Nietzsche has appealed to an odd assortment of followers, from Thomas Mann, Albert Schweitzer, and James Joyce to Eugene O’Neill, Jack London, and Mussolini. What an irony, she writes, since Nietzsche “expressed his horror at the idea of having disciples.”
Although a bit dry in places, this is a rich, nuanced guide to a complex and tortured man.Pub Date: Oct. 30, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5247-6082-3
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Tim Duggan Books/Crown
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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