Raw material on the life of a dissident thinker that does little to enhance or further damage his reputation.
The last volume of the letters and journals of the prototypical mad scientist, Wilhelm Reich (1897–1957).
A prolific writer, erstwhile disciple of Freud and renowned psychiatrist with a special interest in orgasm, Reich left Europe in 1939, when the Nazis burned his books. He immigrated to the United States, where, once more, his books were burned. This final collection of ephemeral material, filled with emphatic italics and capitalization, reeks of transcendent egotism and excessive paranoia. During this time, Reich discovered what he considered to be a mass-free life force, or “orgone energy.” His study consumed him, and all else became secondary. He was driven to calculate how orgone affected hurricanes and drought, emotions and auroras, fleeting sensations and flying saucers, the life of rocks and many cosmic matters. He invented a drought-relieving “Cloudbuster” and proposed to cure radiation sickness. He also devised wooden cabinets lined with steel wool to accumulate curative orgone pulses. These orgone boxes, in which patients, particularly those with sexual complaints, would sit, came to the attention of the FDA. As the lonely investigator’s legal battle continued, his distance from reality, as most of us know it, increased. His defense against the government’s injunction, which required destruction of all orgone-related material and devices, was mismanaged. Convicted of contempt, Reich went to prison in early 1957 and died there before the year ended. Edited by Higgins, the text’s introduction and notes admit no flaws in the master’s thinking, but the book itself is evidence that he was deluded. However, some readers may wonder what he would have said about global warming, dark matter, string theory and other contemporary fields of scientific study.
Raw material on the life of a dissident thinker that does little to enhance or further damage his reputation.Pub Date: Aug. 14, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-374-28883-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
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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