An exceptionally refreshing take on the origins of the Frankfurt School.
A German literary theorist examines how the Neapolitan landscape influenced the philosophical movement known as Critical Theory.
Followers of Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and other Frankfurt School luminaries do not typically associate Naples with Critical Theory or any part of its genesis. But as Mittelmeier shows, “that sulfurous, chaotic [and] exhausting city,” along with the neighboring island of Capri, likely played a far greater role both in the intellectual formation of Frankfurt School proponents and in how they thought about society, history, and modernity. The author takes as his starting point the late summer of 1925, when Adorno, then a music composition student, traveled with Frankfurter Zeitung editor Siegfried Kracauer to Naples, which by that time had become established as the charming “southernmost stop on the grand European educational journey.” There, and especially on Capri, they found themselves surrounded by an intoxicating mix of “nonconformists…dreamers and revolutionaries.” One in particular, literary scholar Walter Benjamin, had become fascinated by porosity, which he detected in the building materials—fashioned from volcanic stone—and social interactions he saw around Naples. Porosity in turn became a concept that Benjamin—and later Adorno—would use to understand and explain social and historical processes that they believed were based on a process of continual intermingling of contradictory elements. For Adorno (as for Benjamin), porosity held possibilities for what he would identify as “unforeseen constellations” out of which new combinations could be born. The author further observes that this concept would revolutionize how both men would structure their theoretical works: less as a clear progression of ideas leading to a definitive conclusion and more as a constellation of dissimilar elements. Vigorous, provocative, and persuasive, Mittelmeier’s book offers original insights that will undoubtedly prove invaluable to scholars of Critical Theory.
An exceptionally refreshing take on the origins of the Frankfurt School.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2024
ISBN: 9780300259308
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Sept. 25, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2024
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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