A wonderfully learned, gracefully written, and simply enjoyable intellectual history of humanism.
A history of humanist thought told through the lives of its major thinkers.
In this fascinating, well-organized journey through the evolution of humanism, Bakewell, award-winning author of At the Existential Café and How To Live, introduces us to the men and women who have resisted religious dogma and fixed ideologies to carve out a way of thinking in which individuals occupy center stage. Humanists are freethinkers, following no predetermined path. They are committed to inquiry and formal education and believe that “the meaning of our lives is to be found in our connections and bonds with others.” Bakewell begins in the 14th century in southern Italy with Petrarch and Boccaccio, both of whom strove to cultivate “the joy in writing” and worked to enlarge and salvage the “wrecked or sunken knowledge” embodied in classical manuscripts. The author then introduces us to such northern humanists as Erasmus and Montaigne, whose famous essays embraced “both [the] philosophical and personal,” along with the Enlightenment thinkers Voltaire, Diderot, and Hume, “the most intellectually merciless thinker of his time.” During the 16th century, Bakewell writes, humanists became “less naively adoring of the past, and ever more interested” in human complexity, fallibility, and uncertainty. Also making an appearance are Harriet Taylor Mill, Charles Darwin, T.H. Huxley, Frederick Douglass, Bertrand Russell, Matthew Arnold, E.M. Forster, and Vasily Grossman, among many others. Bakewell acknowledges anti-humanism as well—fascists in Italy, blasphemy laws, the contemporary zealots of artificial intelligence—and reflects on the challenges that a turbulent 20th century posed to overcoming injustice through independent thought, moral inquiry, and mutual respect. Throughout, Bakewell frequently reminds us that humanism is always a “work in progress.” Ultimately, “history and the human world are neither stable and good on the one hand, nor hopelessly tragic on the other. They are our own work, so if we want it to proceed well, we have to exert ourselves to make it happen.”
A wonderfully learned, gracefully written, and simply enjoyable intellectual history of humanism.Pub Date: March 28, 2023
ISBN: 9780735223370
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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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