Five personal and philosophical essays that are highly insightful, poetic, if sometimes murky stylistically, metaphysically challenging, yet ultimately unsatisfying. AmÇry (nÇ Hans Maier) was an Austrian-born Jew who migrated to Belgium and who joined the anti-Nazi resistance. He wrote an account of torture, Beyond the Mind’s Limits, as well as On Aging (1994). The present book was written during the late 1970s between an unsuccessful and a successful suicide attempt. His interest is on the taking of one’s own life not so much as an act, but rather as a “project” of individual thought and will that defies sociological and psychological truisms. Borrowing a concept from Jean-Paul Sartre, AmÇry helps us understand the sensibility of the suicide as someone who feels compelled to take his or her life in response to an Çchec, or irreversible personal disaster. The person with a “suicidal constitution,” AmÇry notes in a typically intense passage, is moved by “disgust with the world, claustrophobia from the four walls closing in on each other as one hammers one’s head against them.” Serious problems arise, however, when AmÇry attempts to go beyond understanding the suicidal mentality to justifying the suicidal act. In his introduction, translator Barlow notes that AmÇry’s approach is revealed by the very German word he uses for suicide, not the customary Selbstmord (literally, “self-murder”) but rather Freitod (“voluntary death”). In approaching suicide as an act of liberation, he sometimes writes in downright romantic terms about the ultimate act of self-destruction——we only arrive at ourselves in a freely chosen death.” Simultaneously, AmÇry is dismissive, even contemptuous, of what he calls “ridiculously everyday life and its alienation.” More disturbing yet, he writes of suicide almost as if the act took place in an interpersonal vacuum. In short, AmÇry’s legacy in this, his last work, is to provide us with a moving, deep series of insights into the suicide’s world, but an unconvincing attempt to normalize the suicide’s leap of despair.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-253-33563-9
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Indiana Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
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