Demanding yet eloquent and immensely rewarding personal documents of one of the century's leading literary and aesthetic critics. It's the grimmest of ironies that one of the earliest letters here should find the young philosopher standing metaphorically ``at a border crossing''—for Benjamin would end his life by his own despairing hand at a Spanish frontier post in 1940, his entry barred as he fled the advancing Nazi armies. Yet that image of the perpetual traveler on the threshold well suits the writer portrayed in these letters: equally a self-professed materialist devoted to the modern age and a bibliophile immersed in the literary past; close to many circles—Adorno and the Frankfurt School, Brecht's literary collective, Gershom Scholem's Zionism (the three men were among his correspondents, as well)—yet fully a member of none; a voracious consumer of the world yet always something of an outsider. The most bleakly memorable section here is the letters- -almost half the total—recording Benjamin's long and lonely years of exile, beginning with Hitler's seizure of power and ending with his own death. Here Benjamin faces up to his own uncertain prospects, as the material means for his work—living space, even the writing paper he coveted—dwindle and vanish. Constantly changing postmarks bear witness to his peripatetic and increasingly desperate search for refuge; above all, he bears witness to his growing sense of emotional and intellectual isolation. Yet he sets to his work, ``the shelter I step beneath when the weather grows rough outside,'' to recover something from the very culture whose collapse is about to engulf him—a quixotic venture that nevertheless compels our admiration. Unfortunately, this volume—simply a translation, with no new editorial apparatus, of the 30-year-old German edition—is a little unforgiving on the general reader: It's a shame the publisher hasn't supplied more biographical, historical, and cultural context to encourage nonspecialists to make Benjamin's fascinating acquaintance.
Pub Date: June 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-226-04237-5
Page Count: 680
Publisher: Univ. of Chicago
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1994
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
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
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