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
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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