An intellectually dense and well-researched yet brisk journey into one of history’s most persuasive dissenters.
A lively biography of Denis Diderot (1713-1784), provocateur, polymath, and central figure in the French Enlightenment.
Ironically, the philosopher whose name is strongly associated with freethinking kept his freest thoughts under wraps: Thanks to an early lesson in the consequences of candor, he intentionally left mountains of unpublished writings to be discovered after his death. Early writings skewering organized religion and questioning God’s existence earned him public book-burnings and a three-month prison stint. In the ensuing years, he would save his most provocative thoughts about sex and politics for the drawer; his posthumous novel The Nun questioned the immorality of incest and adultery. But he put some of his most challenging ideas in plain sight, if subtly, through his life-consuming, multivolume Encyclopédie, which tweaked the sensibilities of religious leaders while also striving to “pull back the world’s curtain” through anatomical and mechanical illustrations that were rarely available to the public. Curran (Humanities/Wesleyan Univ.; The Anatomy of Blackness, 2011, etc.) gamely sifts through the mountain of Diderot’s output—he was a prolific art critic, lead writer of the Encyclopédie, and an inveterate correspondent—without for a moment making it feel burdensome. Rather, he ably balances the details of Diderot’s life with thoughtful considerations of the source and depth of his philosophical byways, taking his more peculiar ideas seriously but not literally. Curran’s mission is served by his subject’s wealth of experiences: In addition to his run-ins with state and religious leaders, he found a patron and intellectual sparring partner in Catherine the Great and corresponded with Benjamin Franklin before the American Revolution his writings helped inspire. As Curran writes, Diderot argued that kings and religious leaders “were complicit in running a massive illusion factory”; a more skeptical world may be Diderot’s greatest legacy.
An intellectually dense and well-researched yet brisk journey into one of history’s most persuasive dissenters.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-59051-670-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2018
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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