Letters exchanged between 1928 and 1940 by two prominent German intellectuals and scholars of literature, music, and culture, Walter Benjamin and Theodor Wiesengrund-Adorno, now published in their entirety for the first time in English. Benjamin’s and Adorno’s first meeting in 1923 in Frankfurt sparked in each a strong interest in the other’s intellectual pursuits, and eventually led to a dedicated friendship that endured through difficult years of exile. Their exchange continued until Benjamin’s suicide in the Pyrenees, provoked by the threat of forced deportation to Nazi-controlled France. As each correspondent held the other’s professional opinion in high esteem, both spend many pages discussing current research, criticizing each other’s manuscripts, and reviewing the latest academic publications. Their letters help to trace the shaping of such significant projects as Benjamin’s work on Kafka and Baudelaire and Adorno’s on Wagner and jazz, and command respect for their erudition in a wide range of fields, from philosophy to modern culture. As first names eventually replace “Herr Wiesengrund” and “Herr Benjamin,— the letters shed more light on the personalities and daily preoccupations of the two friends, who shared the problems of immigrant life (for Adorno in London and later the US, for Benjamin in France). We learn about their efforts to publish their work and earn money and recognition in a foreign culture. Benjamin reveals concerns about his son Stefan’s mental health and his adventures in procuring a dwelling place in Paris. Adorno, on the other hand, frequently helps his friend with contacts and recommendations, including the arrangements for Benjamin’s abortive immigration to America. Finally, the imminent political cataclysm in their native Germany, particularly the situation of the Jews, sets the worried tone of their later correspondence. While the absence of a comprehensive editorial introduction outlining major landmarks in their biographies and careers is unfortunate, these letters do let Benjamin and Adorno speak eloquently for themselves on many complex issues.
Pub Date: Dec. 10, 1999
ISBN: 0-674-15427-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1999
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.
