Learning lightly worn but hard won; would that all philosophical history were so accessible.
An oddly enjoyable excursus into Enlightenment history, courtesy of René Descartes’s dismembered cadaver and pop-science/history writer Shorto (The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony that Shaped America, 2004, etc.).
Descartes is remembered today—if at all, and if as more than a name—as a stuffy old guy who worried obsessively about how it was that he knew anything and whether he indeed existed. He hit on the fine formula that since he could think, he therefore was. But there’s much more, and therein is the substance of Shorto’s lively look at Cartesian dualism and its discontents. The conceit of the book is that poor Descartes, having been near-deified in life as a very smart fellow—“seen by many of his contemporaries as the man who laid the intellectual foundation for the whole modern program”—was subdivided on his death in 1650. He was partially reassembled some decades later when his remains were removed from Sweden, where he had died cursing his Dutch nemesis and attending physician with his last breaths, to France, where he couldn’t make a living. That conceit worked for Michael Paterniti in regards to Einstein’s brain in Driving Mr. Albert and Paul Collins seeking Paine’s skeleton in The Trouble with Tom, but here it’s mostly a peg on which to hang some thorny problems in Western philosophy. Do we think? Is there a ghost in the machine? What do we know? If we’re so smart, why can’t we live forever? (Some of Descartes’s contemporaries, Shorto writes, refused to believe that the good doctor was mortal.) Descartes was short on confidently settled answers when he died, but, as Shorto writes, he had settled on two enemies: “authority…and fuzzy thinking.” Considering what has followed, those seem good things to resist.
Learning lightly worn but hard won; would that all philosophical history were so accessible.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-385-51753-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2008
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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