Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

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Benjamin Franklin, writes journalist and biographer Walter Isaacson, was that rare Founding Father who would sooner wink at a passer-by than sit still for a formal portrait. What's more, Isaacson relates in this fluent and entertaining biography, the revolutionary leader represents a political tradition that has been all but forgotten today, one that prizes pragmatism over moralism, religious tolerance over fundamentalist rigidity, and social mobility over class privilege. That broadly democratic sensibility allowed Franklin his contradictions, as Isaacson shows. Though a man of lofty principles, Franklin wasn't shy of using sex to sell the newspapers he edited and published; though far from frivolous, he liked his toys and his mortal pleasures; and though he sometimes gave off a simpleton image, he was a shrewd and even crafty politician. Isaacson doesn't shy from enumerating Franklin's occasional peccadilloes and shortcomings, in keeping with the iconoclastic nature of our time--none of which, however, stops him from considering Benjamin Franklin "the most accomplished American of his age," and one of the most admirable of any era. And here's one bit of proof: as a young man, Ben Franklin regularly went without food in order to buy books. His example, as always, is a good one--and this is just the book to buy with the proceeds from the grocery budget. --Gregory McNamee

Book Description

Benjamin Franklin is the founding father who winks at us, the one who seems made of flesh rather than marble. In this authoritative and engrossing full-scale biography, Walter Isaacson shows how the most fascinating of America's founders helped define our national character.

In a sweeping narrative that follows Franklin's life from Boston to Philadelphia to London and Paris and back, Isaacson chronicles the adventures of the spunky runaway apprentice who became, during his 84-year life, America's best writer, inventor, media baron, scientist, diplomat, and business strategist, as well as one of its most practical and ingenious political leaders. He explores the wit behind Poor Richard's Almanac and the wisdom behind the Declaration of Independence, the new nation's alliance with France, the treaty that ended the Revolution, and the compromises that created a near-perfect Constitution.

Above all, Isaacson shows how Franklin's unwavering faith in the wisdom of the common citizen and his instinctive appreciation for the possibilities of democracy helped to forge an American national identity based on the virtues and values of its middle class.

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"Benjamin Franklin is the Founding Father who winks at us. An ambitious urban entrepreneur who rose up the social ladder, from leather-aproned shopkeeper to dining with kings, he seems made of flesh rather than of marble. In bestselling author Walter Isaacson's vivid and witty full-scale biography, we discover why Franklin seems to turn to us from history's stage with eyes that twinkle from behind his new-fangled spectacles. By bringing Franklin to life, Isaacson shows how he helped to define both his own time and ours. He was, during his 84-year life, America's best scientist, inventor, diplomat, writer, and business strategist, and he was also one of its most practical -- though not most profound -- political thinkers. He was the only man who shaped all the founding documents of America: the Albany Plan of Union, the Declaration of Independence, the treaty of alliance with France, the peace treaty with England, and the Constitution. And he helped invent America's unique style of homespun humor, democratic values, and philosophical pragmatism. But the most interesting thing that Franklin invented, and continually reinvented, was himself. America's first great publicist, he was, in his life and in his writings, consciously trying to create a new American archetype. In the process, he carefully crafted his own persona, portrayed it in public, and polished it for posterity. In this colorful and intimate narrative, Isaacson provides the full sweep of Franklin's amazing life, from his days as a runaway printer to his triumphs as a statesman, scientist, and Founding Father. He chronicles Franklin's tumultuous relationship with his illegitimate son and grandson, his practical marriage, and his flirtations with the ladies of Paris. He also shows how Franklin helped to create the American character and why he has a particular resonance in the twenty-first century. "

Customer Reviews:

Underwhelming.......2007-10-10

This biography had its moments, but Isaacson was far too enamored of Franklin, and did not present a balanced view. He was overly critical of Adams, but failed to be objectively critical of Franklin (or the other Founding Fathers) in return. Franklin is the Founding Father I'd most like to meet, but this biography is far too flattering, and really, rather dull. Isaacson is a serviceable writer, but does not make the story really come alive.

Franklin was ahead of his time.......2007-10-03

Many of the reviews already give the praise to this book that I would give. As I kept reading I found it amazing that this man was actually born 300 years ago. Many of his views are still so relevant today. I kept finding myself saying, "Yes, I totally agree with Franklin's opinion on that." I can imagine Franklin living in 2007 and being fascinated with things like the Internet and communication. However, I bet he would be the type of person who would still find time to write a letter and sit back and relax with some friends and tea which we so often fail to do today. Great book!

Great Book!.......2007-09-15

This bio was thoroughly enjoyable. I expected it to be informative and educational, but what I didn't expect was to be entertained. Franklin was a very complex man, both deep and shallow. He had very shallow relationships with his family, mainly his wife and son, very flirtaceous with other women, while being a deep thinker, an entrepreneur, American statesman, diplomat and genius. There's a lot of American history in the book with out being slow and boring.

I simply loved this book.

Thoroughly enjoyable........2007-09-13

I read elsewhere that Franklin was about 70 years of age before going to France as Embassador. He was quick witted to be sure but a bit unpredictable for his French caretakers. He left nothing for them in his will. Isaacson did a wonderful job of reporting on Frankin's irascible character.

Entertaining and Enlightening.......2007-08-29

Walter Issacson is a very meticulous and loquacious writer. I found myself looking for the dictionary while trying to decipher the meaning of his writing. The book is very verbose, very detailed, and gives an accurate and balanced view into Franklin's personal and political life.

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Of Benjamin, Dwarfs and Angels
Clarity and Brilliance
Just a quick note
Brilliance
Indispensable reading

Illuminations: Essays and Reflections
Walter Benjamin
Manufacturer: Schocken
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Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0805202412
Release Date: 1969-01-13

Book Description

Walter Benjamin was one of the most original cultural critics of the twentieth century. Illuminations includes his views on Kafka, with whom he felt a close personal affinity; his studies on Baudelaire and Proust; and his essays on Leskov and on Brecht's Epic Theater. Also included are his penetrating study "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," an enlightening discussion of translation as a literary mode, and Benjamin's theses on the philosophy of history.

Hannah Arendt selected the essays for this volume and introduces them with a classic essay about Benjamin's life in dark times. Also included is a new preface by Leon Wieseltier that explores Benjamin's continued relevance for our times.

Customer Reviews:

Of Benjamin, Dwarfs and Angels.......2006-08-28

The depth of Benjamin's pessimism has, I think, been underestimated.

"The story is told of an automation constructed in such a way that it could play a winning game of chess, answering each move of an opponent with a countermove. A puppet in Turkish attire and with a hookah in its mouth sat before a chessboard placed on a large table. A system of mirrors created the illusion that this table was transparent from all sides. Actually, a little hunchback who was an expert chess player sat inside and guided the puppet's hand by means of strings. One can imagine a philosophical counterpart to this device. The puppet called "historical materialism" is to win all the time. It can easily be a match for anyone if it enlists the services of theology, which today, as we know, is wizened and has to keep out of sight." Walter Benjamin, First "These on the Philosophy of History", p 253.

One can measure how far the contemporary Marxist (better said, the post or semi-Marxist) left has fallen by how many books have appeared, since the fall of the USSR, enthusing over the radically Universal and allegedly 'Progressive' nature of early Christianity. Walter Benjamin, who was first to place the wise but ugly dwarf (Theology) in the beautiful puppet (Historical Materialism) would be amazed (or perhaps not, see the letters between Benjamin and Scholem) to learn that puppet and dwarf are on the verge of switching places! That is, now the ugly dwarf (historical materialism) wants to hide in (and of course direct) the beautiful puppet of Christian theology. ...Crazy, you say? But even Habermas, the Keeper of the Flame of Critical Theory, has on occasion made somewhat similar noises. The best place, btw, to start reading about this new 'political-theology' probably remains Jacob Taubes.

But perhaps this emergent trend is really not so crazy after all. The only reason the Church became so cozy with Capitalism was its fear of Atheism. The collapse of the Soviet Union ended that fear. Now Christianity faces Capitalism alone. Or not, if the detente being proposed between the left and the Church is actually consummated. But every detente is a conspiracy of enemies to destroy an even greater enemy. The Church was with Capitalism because it had to defeat atheism. Now it is likely that the Church will join (a moderate) Socialism in trying to contain the 'soul-destroying' ravages of capitalism. This is only another move on the chessboard of History. ...But what did Benjamin think of History?

"A Klee painting named "Angelus Novus" shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress." BENJAMIN, Ninth Thesis on History, p 257.

Picture this Angel, wings pinned back by the wind, shoulders forced back because of that - the Angel of History is almost in the position of the Crucified Christ; except that this crucification does not end. It is this tone of almost ontological despair that was new to the left. This Crucified Angel is the perfect image of the left-wing theoretical pessimism pioneered by not only Benjamin but also Adorno and Horkheimer that split the intellectual left into two camps: the revolutionary and the cultural. And though no one is likely to admit it, the cultural left has quietly come to think of revolution itself as but another 'progressive' force piling up bodies.

It is one of the little ironies of history that this despairing fantasy described contemporary reality exactly. The Angel of History is the image of dialectical knowledge. Rather than seeing disconnected events this Dialectical Knowledge grasps History as One (single catastrophe). Always facing the past ('the owl of Minerva takes flight at night', Hegel said; meaning that dialectical knowledge is retrospective) the 'contemplating' Angel is overwhelmed by historical action - the storm that has been blowing since the expulsion of humanity from paradise - and can never Himself achieve effective action. His knowledge grows in lockstep with the accumulating horror, but each new historical event only results (i,e., gets 'caught in the wings' of our Angel) in more contemplation. So we see how theory (our Angel) is 'irresistibly' propelled into the future. And we also see that the Knowledge dialectical theory gains is precisely equal to the debris the storm hurls at our Angel's feet. With an irony that strives to be equal to the wind blowing from Paradise Benjamin ends this meditation by calling this storm progress.

This is perhaps why Benjamin insisted over 50 years ago that the dwarf Theology must guide the puppet Historical Materialism. Theory can never be equal to action; circumstance piles upon circumstance so rapidly that theory cannot effectively act, and if it does act (presumably) it only adds to the debris. Thus theology (myth) must guide materialism's hand because theoretical knowledge is powerless to help. Benjamin quotes the following remarks of Willy Haas, with approval, in his large Kafka essay;

"'The object of the trial', he writes, 'indeed, the real hero of this incredible book is forgetting, whose main characteristic is the forgetting of itself [...] The most sacred ... act of the ... ritual is the erasing of sins from the book of memory.'
What has been forgotten - and this insight affords us yet another avenue of access to Kafka's work - is never something purely individual." (Benjamin, Franz Kafka, p 131.)

(The last sentence was Benjamin's own.) Theology is a non-individual forgetfulness. Thus myth (theology) is the only forgetfulness worthy of the name. What needs to be forgotten by all of us is the unsurpassable fact of the futility of theory...

It is difficult for most to look such despair in the face.

Clarity and Brilliance.......2006-04-17

In 1940 Walter Benjamin committed suicide at the Franco-Spanish border fearing that he would be unable to escape the grasp of Hitler's regime. He left behind perhaps one of the finest collections of literary theory of his era, complete with lucidly brilliant essays on Kafka, Proust, Baudelaire, and general Marxist theory.

In this wholly excellent collection of essays, a remarkable introduction to Benjamin's life and work is provided by the late philosopher Hannah Arendt, who overviews his political formations and literary output. It's a model form of critical essay writing.

Perhaps the most famous essay in this collection is Benjamin's `The Task of the Translator,' widely regarded as one of the most important and thoughtful contributions to the field.

"No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no sympathy for the listener."

He argues that translation is a mode, and that the translatability of the work is the primary concern in the process.

Also included is an analysis of the philosophy of history.

Just a quick note.......2005-07-01

I have nothing to add to the reviews below except to note for scholarly interest that the essay 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction' included in this collection is not Benjamin's final version. (Neither is this title a good translation of the German: 'Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit'. Zohn's translation in the selected writings is better: 'The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility'.) The text in this collection is the 1935 manuscript, as originally published in 1936; the text collected in the Selected Writings, Vol. 3 is the final 1936 version that, as far as I can tell, was not published in Benjamin's lifetime. The difference between the two texts is slight, consisting mainly of some additional sentences here and there and some changed words. At least one of these revisions is, I hypothesize, the result of Adorno's criticisms of his letter to Benjamin of 18 Mar 1936.

Otherwise, for most purposes, this is the best collection of Benjamin's essays available for an introduction to his thought. This volume collects some of the best of his essays that are otherwise spread throughout the selected writings published by the Harvard U.P.

Brilliance.......2005-05-12

I picked up this book primarily for the purpose of reading Benjamin's critically acclaimed essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction", as well as for his darkly poetic - and even apocalyptic - "Theses on the Philosophy of History". These essays are among Benjamin's most highly esteemed and are the last two selections in the book; regardless of whether you start with them or with the first essay, "Unpacking My Library: A Talk about Book Collecting", you are likely to be drawn into Benjamin's literary world quite quickly.

In many ways, Benjamin's writing style is quite unassuming; reading even his most profound insights is like reading a letter from an old friend. His writing comes in layers; one must make time to savor his presence. This book covers a range of subjects, from critical literary essays (the aforementioned "Unpacking My Library", as well as essays on Kafka, Baudelaire and Proust), to more hermeneutical reflections ("The Task of the Translator"), to straight up philosophy/theory ("The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" and "Theses on the Philosophy of History").

The 51 page introduction by Hannah Arendt is absolutely fantastic. It does not simply provide an overview of Benjamin's life, but sets that life within the culture of early 20th century Germany, focusing especially on the time between the two World Wars. She notes the influences of Zionism and Communism (and Marxism) on Benjamin's thought, as well as the broader cultural influence of a quasi-secularized Judaism in a culture where non-baptized Jews were still kept out of university teaching posts. Her introduction, like Benjamin's own writing, contains deep touches of the intimately personal (she selected the various essays that make up this volume).

In many ways, Benjamin was a deeply religious thinker. A friend of Gershom Scholem's (the founder of the modern-day study of Jewish mysticism), Benjamin and Scholem corresponded for a number of years. Although this particular volume pays little attention to his religious thought, "Theses on the Philosophy of History" (the final selection in the book which, in light of Benjamin's suicide, gives Illuminations a bit of a haunting finale), witnesses to Benjamin's poetic-religious insights:

"The soothsayers who found out from time what it had in store certainly did not experience time as either homogenous or empty. Anyone who keeps this in mind will perhaps get an idea of how past times were experienced in remembrance - namely, in just the same way. We know how the Jews were prohibited from investigating the future. This stripped the future of its magic, to which all those succumb who turn to the soothsayers for enlightenment. This does not imply, however, that for the Jews the future turned into homogenous, empty time. For every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter."

Highly recommended.

Indispensable reading.......2004-07-23

Benjamin is arguably the twentieth century's most important thinker--if there is anything left to say about our lives, it is surely in this book.

Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings

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A Portable Benjamin
Wise and witty, with a keen eye for detail
"A Highly Polished Mind"
Reflections:
He was really a pretty funny guy if you give him a chance...

Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings
Walter Benjamin
Manufacturer: Schocken
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 080520802X
Release Date: 1986-03-12

Book Description

A companion volume to Illuminations, the first collection of Walter Benjamin's writings, Reflections presents a further sampling of his wide-ranging work. Here Benjamin evolves a theory of language as the medium of all creation, discusses theater and surrealism, reminisces about Berlin in the 1920s, recalls conversations with Bertolt Brecht, and provides travelogues of various cities, including Moscow under Stalin. He moves seamlessly from literary criticism to autobiography to philosophical-theological speculations, cementing his reputation as one of the greatest and most versatile writers of the twentieth century. Also included is a new preface by Leon Wieseltier that explores Benjamin's continued relevance for our times.

Customer Reviews:

A Portable Benjamin.......2004-12-07

There is much to love about Walter Benjamin. His is a supple, syncretic, synthetic mind, and his prose just sings-even in translation. Because Benjamin roamed about in whole territorities of thought, it's nearly impossible to draw together a representative selection of his essays without overlooking something important. The collection Illuminations is a delgith; Reflections, a kind of companion volume, includes much material that reflects the Benjamin corpus from a non-Illuminations trajectory.

Benjamin's essay "Critique of Violence" is worth the price of the book on its own; while I disagree with his idea that a state must have a monopoly on violence (more likely that a state desires such a monopoly but has to play make-believe because it can't complete a monopoly...), Benjamin's analysis is crisp and precise. It's as good as the "Treatise on Nomadology" of Deleuze and Guattari, which covers the same kind of ground.

This sounds cheesy, but I really think Benjamin's example of ranging far and wide and deep into detail when inquiring into something, not letting his hang-ups hinder his thinking, is something for an intellectual to aspire to. And he's a joy to read.

Wise and witty, with a keen eye for detail.......2004-10-22

This collection of Benjamin essays was selected and introduced by Peter Demetz based on an order prepared by Hannah Arendt. It is a companion piece to Illuminations, a siimilar volume prepared and introduced by Arendt in the late sixties. Unlike Illuminations, which focuses on the literary essays Benjamin wrote, Reflections is intended to present a wide variety of subject and style.

In his introduction, Demetz urges the reader to listen to Benjamin in a musical rather than a literary way. Indeed, this book works very well if you approach it as an impressionistic meander through the style and range of thought present in the essays. I would be hard-pressed to describe how to rationally link the autobiographic travel writing of "A Berlin Chronicle" with the aphorisms of "One Way Street" or the Marxist thought in the essays on Brecht. All the same, they feel linked as a reading experience. That linkage may be more on the sound than the subject-- the sound of a very smart man thinking very hard and with great elegance.

Benjamin is never a dry writer. Some other reviewers have remarked on his humor, which definitely exists. It is also worth highlighting his keen eye for detail, his openness to self-examination, his practical advice about writing, and his distinctive turn of phrase which somehow survives through the translation process.

It would be difficult to find a book that I would recommend more highly.

"A Highly Polished Mind".......2000-12-29

Reflections presents for the reader the great range that Benjamin had as a writer, critic and occidentalist. This collection further demonstrates Benjamin's acute awareness of the literature of his time, as evidenced by his essay on 'Surrealism', which is as fine a reflection on its themes as the manifestos of Andre Breton. Furthermore, his writings and conversations with Bertolt Brecht show Benjamin to be very close to the thinking of the author himself. Also included is his celebrated essay on Karl Kraus,"the Jewish Swift of Vienna". But what I like most about this collection are the amorphisms and autobiographical sketches of 'Marseilles' and 'One-way Street'. In his images of Marseilles Benjamin creates an "exegesis of the city" that is as fine as any poet could offer; spellbinding, acute, and beautiful. As well, his wit and insight into social phenomena is detailed in 'One-Way Street', and also in the piece on Moscow, which lets the western reader experience a rare witnessing of the Russian city in the years after the Revolution in a way that recalls Dziga Vertov. Finally, the inclusion of several pieces of Benjamin's philosophical-theological speculations show that he was a man of great breath and wisedom, and further showcase the wide range of his highly polished mind.

Reflections:.......2000-10-05

I think that this book is a forgery by appenine fascist youth. Like most of this book's readers, they took their master plan far too seriously. It's this inability to laugh which makes the work canonical, but nonetheless a product of unknown authorship.

He was really a pretty funny guy if you give him a chance..........1999-03-30

"Walter Benjamin is now recognized as one of the most accute analysts of literary and sociological phenomena of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A companion volume to Illuminations, the earlier collection of Benjamin's writings, Reflections presents a new sampling of his wide-ranging work. In addition to literary criticism, it contains autobiograohical narration and travel pieces, aphorisms, and philosophical-theological speculations. Most of Benjamin's writings on Brecht and his celebrated essay on Karl Kraus are included."

Book Description

Begun in Poveromo, Italy, in 1932, and extensively revised in 1938, Berlin Childhood around 1900 remained unpublished during Walter Benjamin's lifetime, one of his "large-scale defeats." Now translated into English for the first time in book form, on the basis of the recently discovered "final version" that contains the author's own arrangement of a suite of luminous vignettes, it can be more widely appreciated as one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century prose writing.

Not an autobiography in the customary sense, Benjamin's recollection of his childhood in an upper-middle-class Jewish home in Berlin's West End at the turn of the century becomes an occasion for unified "expeditions into the depths of memory." In this diagram of his life, Benjamin focuses not on persons or events but on places and things, all seen from the perspective of a child--a collector, flaneur, and allegorist in one.

This book is also one of Benjamin's great city texts, bringing to life the cocoon of his childhood--the parks, streets, schoolrooms, and interiors of an emerging metropolis. It reads the city as palimpsest and labyrinth, revealing unexpected lyricism in the heart of the familiar.

As an added gem, a preface by Howard Eiland discusses the genesis and structure of the work, which marks the culmination of Benjamin's attempt to do philosophy concretely.

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Excellent book.
The Original Diplomat

A Benjamin Franklin Reader
Walter Isaacson
Manufacturer: Simon & Schuster
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Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0743273982

Book Description

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN'S GREATEST WRITINGS

Edited and Annotated by Walter Isaacson

Selected and annotated by the author of the acclaimed Benjamin Franklin: An American Life, this collection of Franklin's writings shows why he was the bestselling author of his day and remains America's favorite founder and wit. Includes an introductory essay exploring Franklin's life and impact as a writer, and each piece is accompanied by a preface and notes that provide background, context, and analysis.

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"Selected and annotated by the author of the acclaimed Benjamin Franklin: An American Life, this collection of Franklin's writings shows why he was the bestselling author of his day and remains America's favorite Founder and wit. As a twelve-year-old apprentice in his brother's print shop, Benjamin Franklin taught himself to be a writer by taking notes on the works of great essayists such as Addison and Steele, jumbling them up, and then trying to recreate them in his own words. By that method, he recalled in his Autobiography, he was encouraged to think he might become a ""tolerable"" writer. In fact, he became the best, most popular, and most influential writer in colonial America. His direct and practical prose shaped America's democratic character, and his homespun humor gave birth to the nation's unique brand of crackerbarrel wisdom. This book collects dozens of Franklin's delight-ful essays and letters, along with a complete version of his Autobiography. It includes an introductory essay exploring Franklin's life and impact as a writer, and each piece is accompanied by a preface and notes that provide background, context, and analysis. Through the writings and the introductory essays, the reader can trace the development of Franklin's thinking, along with the birth of the nation he and his pen helped to invent. "

Customer Reviews:

Excellent book. .......2007-04-13

This is a fine selection from Franklin's writings, including the entire 'Autobiography'. All texts have been judiciously chosen by the editor, arranged in chronological order and prefaced by intelligent, concise and well written introductory notes. Franklin's importance and permanence clearly emerge from the reading.

I only wish there were more excerpts from Franklin's delightful 'Poor Richard's Almanac'. The selections presented in this edition come from the Almanacs for the years 1733, 1734, 1736, 1737, 1738 and 1739, and they barely fill 15 pages. Nonetheless they might well satisfy the reader and in any event there is plenty of rarely published letters and articles from the Pennsylvania Gazette to make up for the possible lack of material from the almanacs signed by 'Richard Saunders'.

This is the perfect book to discover Franklin and also a very good one for those who already know him, thanks to the editors insightful notes and to the opportunity to review Franklin's writings in chronological order, from a historical and biographical perspective.

The Original Diplomat.......2006-05-25

This is a great collection of the writings of Benjamin Franklin. For me, the real value here lies not so much in the fact that he was a self-made man, but in the advice he gave about connecting with people and interacting with others both from a business and from a personal point of view. His ability in that area led directly to his success (along with some luck). I wish more people read the Autobiography and other papers just for that reason alone. In the long run, that may be the greatest contribution made by Ben Franklin.

Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship (New York Review Books Classics)

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A great intellectual friendship and a tragic end

Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship (New York Review Books Classics)
Gershom Gerhard Scholem
Manufacturer: NYRB Classics
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 1590170326
Release Date: 2003-04-30

Book Description

Gershom Scholem is celebrated as the twentieth century's most profound student of the Jewish mystical tradition; Walter Benjamin, as a master thinker whose extraordinary essays mix the revolutionary, the revelatory, and the esoteric. Scholem was a precocious teenager when he met Benjamin, who became his close friend and intellectual mentor. His account of that relationshipÑwhich was to remain crucial for both menÑis both a celebration of his friend's spellbinding genius and a lament for the personal and intellectual self-destructiveness that culminated in Benjamin's suicide in 1940.

At once prickly and heartbroken, argumentative and loving, Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship is an absorbing memoir with the complication of character and motive of a novel. As Scholem revisits the passionate engagements over Marxism and Kabbala, Europe and Palestine that he shared with Benjamin, it is as if he sought to summon up his lost friend's spirit again, to have the last word in the argument that might have saved his life.

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A great intellectual friendship and a tragic end .......2004-12-14

This is the story of a friendship between two of the most remarkable intellectual figures of the twentieth century , Gershom Scholem and Walter Benjamin. It begins in Berlin in 1914 and continues through their separation until Benjamin's tragic death twenty -five years later. Both of them were greatly interested in the historical processes of their times, in philology , in the meaning of signs and symbols, in Socialism, in Zionism. Scholem left Germany for the Jerusalem of pre- state Israel and became a central figure there in the development of the Hebrew University. He became too the great scholar who opened a new field that of Jewish Mysticism. Benjamin hesitated and seemed to always find the way to misfortune. But their conversation and their friendship illuminates fundamental issues of life and thought. This book should be read by everyone for whom the life of the mind is important.

One-Way Street and Other Writings (The Verso Classics Series)

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One-Way Street and Other Writings (The Verso Classics Series)
Walter Benjamin
Manufacturer: Verso Books
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ASIN: 185984197X

Veiled Visions: The 1906 Atlanta Race Riot and the Reshaping of American Race Relations

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Veiled Visions: The 1906 Atlanta Race Riot and the Reshaping of American Race Relations
David Fort Godshalk
Manufacturer: The University of North Carolina Press
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Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0807856266
Release Date: 2006-02-23

Book Description

In 1906 Atlanta, after a summer of inflammatory headlines and accusations of black-on-white sexual assaults, armed white mobs attacked African Americans, resulting in at least twenty-five black fatalities. Atlanta's black residents fought back and repeatedly defended their neighborhoods from white raids. Placing this four-day riot in a broader narrative of twentieth-century race relations in Atlanta, in the South, and in the United States, David Fort Godshalk examines the riot's origins and how memories of this cataclysmic event shaped black and white social and political life for decades to come.

Nationally, the riot radicalized many civil rights leaders, encouraging W. E. B. Du Bois's confrontationist stance and diminishing the accommodationist voice of Booker T. Washington. In Atlanta, fears of continued disorder prompted white civic leaders to seek dialogue with black elites, establishing a rare biracial tradition that convinced mainstream northern whites that racial reconciliation was possible in the South without national intervention. Paired with black fears of renewed violence, however, this interracial cooperation exacerbated black social divisions and repeatedly undermined black social justice movements, leaving the city among the most segregated and socially stratified in the nation. Analyzing the interwoven struggles of men and women, blacks and whites, social outcasts and national powerbrokers, Godshalk illuminates the possibilities and limits of racial understanding and social change in twentieth-century America.

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My Nile

As close to a personal memoir as we get with McMurtry

Very Enjoyable

A Life Explained in Detail.

Reflections of a lime Dr. Pepper drinker

Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen : Reflections on Sixty and Beyond
Larry McMurtry
Manufacturer: Simon & Schuster
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Antiquarian & Rare Books | Books & Reading | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
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General | Criticism & Theory | History & Criticism | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
General | McMurtry, Larry | ( M ) | Authors, A-Z | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
Paperback | McMurtry, Larry | ( M ) | Authors, A-Z | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
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ASIN: 0684870193

Amazon.com

Do you really want to listen to a cranky old man ramble on about his childhood, his heart surgery, his hobbies, his son, and the way things, in general, aren't what they used to be? It turns out you do. In Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen, Larry McMurtry comes the old pardner, and the result is a powerful elegy for the lost spaces in American life. He takes as his starting point an afternoon he spent at the Dairy Queen in Archer City, Texas, reading the pensées of early 20th-century German philosopher Walter Benjamin. At the time Benjamin was writing, McMurtry's grandparents were settling dusty reaches of west Texas, and McMurtry crosscuts neatly between Benjamin's spent, smoky Europe and his own grandparents' America: "While my grandparents were dealing with almost absolute emptiness, both social and cultural, Europe was approaching an absolute (and perhaps intolerable) density." McMurtry demonstrates a confidence almost bordering on naiveté in the way he appropriates the great thinking of Europe and applies it to his own history. He apologizes neither to the highfalutin Europeans nor to the down-home Americans, but makes them lie down together any way he sees fit. This brio makes Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen a thrilling read.

McMurtry's book-length essay loops outward from Archer City to encompass a polemic against computers, a foray into the world of book collecting, a family biography, an account of his soul-loss after heart surgery, and finally an elegy for the cowboy. This last lament casts a shadow back over what we've read. Not just over this book, but over McMurtry's whole body of work. A man who's lived his whole life in print gives us a glimpse of what has fed him, and, strangely, it's loss. "Because of when and where I grew up, on the Great Plains just as the herding tradition was beginning to lose its vitality, I have been interested all my life in vanishing breeds." The master of storytelling is finally revealed as a master of melancholy. --Claire Dederer

Book Description

In a lucid, brilliant work of nonfiction -- as close to an autobiography as his readers are likely to get -- Larry McMurtry has written a family portrait that also serves as a larger portrait of Texas itself, as it was and as it has become.

Using as a springboard an essay by the German literary critic Walter Benjamin that he first read in Archer City's Dairy Queen, McMurtry examines the small-town way of life that big oil and big ranching have nearly destroyed. He praises the virtues of everything from a lime Dr. Pepper to the lost art of oral storytelling, and describes the brutal effect of the sheer vastness and emptiness of the Texas landscape on Texans, the decline of the cowboy, and the reality and the myth of the frontier.

McMurtry writes frankly and with deep feeling about his own experiences as a writer, a parent, and a heart patient, and he deftly lays bare the raw material that helped shape his life's work: the creation of a vast, ambitious, fictional panorama of Texas in the past and the present. Throughout, McMurtry leaves his readers with constant reminders of his all-encompassing, boundless love of literature and books.

Customer Reviews:

My Nile.......2007-01-28

Larry McMurtry is, as Proust and Virginia Woolf are to him, my Nile of literature. The quality of his prolific output has been inconsistent, but I find myself constantly returning to his work. Like all writers, McMurtry has his faults. But he is the best I have encountered in warding off, to paraphrase Harold Bloom, that dark inertia to which we are all susceptible.

One of McMurtry's rare pieces of non-fiction, this is an intensely readable book - intentionally so, it seems, following the path of the oral tradition. McMurtry mourns the demise of this tradition, while at the same time seeking to find the positive in the historical developments that have killed it. McMurtry's yarns describe his childhood, his discovery of books, and his bouts with depression, including his ruminations on literature's place in his life, and his life's place in this country's physical, historical, and literary landscape.

All of the tributary themes of the book join together as the book progresses, through McMurtry's own White and Blue Nile of Proust (who I personally like) and Woolf (with whom I have never been able to connect)and into a general inspiration to literature. McMurtry says that he early identified books as the central and stable activity in his life. This book is a testament to the joys and comforts of doing the same.

As close to a personal memoir as we get with McMurtry.......2006-12-23

Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen: Reflections at Sixty and Beyond by Larry McMurtry. Larry McMurtry was influenced by an essay he first read in a Texas Dairy Queen by Walter Benjamin. The essay he was reading was about the dissipation of memory and the loss of narrative power in fiction today.

Larry McMurtry writes about growing up on a ranch in Archer City, Texas. He shares discovering reading and books as a teen, going to college at Rice University, knowing virtually nothing about literature, transferring to North Texas State University to finish his bachelor's degree as a workaround for a troublesome Rice professor, and then doing his Master's at Rice University.

He tells some about writing, his love for books that leads to his becoming a book scout and antiquarian book dealer. Across from the Archer City court house he has a giant bookstore containing a quarter-million used books, and the dying legacy of the cowboy. He shares little about his personal life except his love for reading and his quadruple bypass surgery which was very traumatic. It may be as close to a personal memoir as we get with McMurtry. The work is well written, wide, but not deep. We do not get to know McMurty at a level most would like to experience.

Read and reviewed by Jimmie A. Kepler.

Very Enjoyable.......2006-11-20

This sat on my shelf for years and I finally pulled it down. I'm glad I did. He expounds on aging, the west, books, his own writing, and reading. His writing is conversational and comfortable. Very enjoyable!

A Life Explained in Detail........2005-09-25

In this melancholy memorir of sorts, he reminates about his life growing up on the Great Plains in small-town Texas, about the vast emptiness of the Texas landscape and it effect it has on the natives. There is a vast loneliness and he feels he has been born too late so he develops an interest in vanishing breeds. The Old West has come and gone. Some time ago, I reviewed his book, THE COLONEL AND LITTLE MISSIE.

He extolls the virtues of the Archer City Dairy Queen (no where else to go back then (we still have some of those places here in Knoxville) in the Eighties where he'd go to read as he drank a strasnge concoction of Dr. Pepper with lime. Now, you can get a lime Slushie with a real cherry at Sonic, the drive-in of today.

He'd started on a translation of the German philosophre, Walter Benjamin's 'Illuminations,' a group of essays. He particularly liked "The Storyteller," and refers to it often as he thinks back on his life "to think about place, his life, literature and his relation to it." For twenty-five years, he has been telling his stories in book form, some of which were turned into movies, like LONESOME DOVE, THE LAST PICTURE SHOW, BUFFALO GIRLS and TERMS OF ENDEARMENT.

He compares Benjamin's life in Europe with that of his grandparents settling in Texas, "while my grandparents were dealing with vast emptiness...Europe was approaching density (absolute and perhaps intolerable." There is no comparison, as they were on completely opposite polars.

He'd gone on a lifelong quest to study European literature to learn their culture that spawned his own pioneer family, a quest which comes full circle, with his reminiscences for this book. He loves to remind folks of the way things used to be and this erudite elegy for the lost paces in American life and of the cowboy" comes forefront. He doesn't care much for Paul Theroux's early mentor, V. S. Pritchett.

He gives an intelligent assessment of his career and the demise of oral storytelling. He promotes the need for reading and appreciated the works of Proust. He comes across as a bitter, cranky old man as he tells about his childhood and feeling 'soul-less' after his heart surgery. He's had a great career studing life and writing some strange novels. Some others are THE EVENING STAR, TEXASVILLE, and STREETS OF LOREDO.

Reflections of a lime Dr. Pepper drinker.......2005-09-20

Influenced by an essay he first read in a Texas Dairy Queen (while drinking a lime Dr. Pepper) by Walter Benjamin about the dissipation of memory and the loss of narrative power in fiction today, McMurtry writes about growing up on a ranch in Archer City, Texas, discovering reading and books as a teen, going to college knowing virtually nothing about literature, becoming a book scout and antiquarian book dealer (he's turned his old hometown into a giant bookstore containing a quarter-million used books), and, of course, the dying legacy of the cowboy. He writes little or nothing about his persoanl life (except his love for reading and his quadruple bipass surgery). He expresses often a love for Proust and Virginia Woolf, but never tells why. It's a somewhat interesting book (for those who care about McMurtry as a writer), but it doesn't go very far beneath the surface.

Jewish Writers, German Literature: The Uneasy Examples of Nelly Sachs and Walter Benjamin

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Jewish Writers, German Literature: The Uneasy Examples of Nelly Sachs and Walter Benjamin

Manufacturer: University of Michigan Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

German | World Literature | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

General | Poetry | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Jewish | Ethnic & National | Biographies & Memoirs | Subjects | Books
ASIN: 047210621X

Book Description

By any account, German-speaking Jews have made among the greatest contributions to world culture in this century--one thinks of Wittgenstein and Husserl in philosophy, Freud in psychoanalysis, Kafka in fiction, and Paul Celan in poetry. Yet most Jews were exiled from German-speaking lands (when they were not murdered there), and they have never been integrated within German culture as such.

The poet Nelly Sachs, who won the Nobel Prize in 1966 for her poetry on the Holocaust, and the critic Walter Benjamin are two such German- Jewish writers: born just over a century ago in Berlin and exiled from Germany in the 1930s, both were acclaimed after World War II (Benjamin posthumously), yet neither, to this day, is anything but an outsider to German literature. The present collection of essays addresses the uneasy relationship between Jews who are masters of the German language and the German literary tradition that still cannot accept the otherness of Jewish writers.

After a biographical and historical introduction by the volume's two editors, individual chapters are devoted to Sachs, to Benjamin, to their comparison, and to Sachs in an international context. Topics explored include the Jewish themes and motifs in Sachs's distinctive verse-dramas; the limits of poetic metaphor with respect to representations of the Holocaust; the relationship of Benjamin's theories of dramatic language to Sachs's verse- dramas; and Benjamin's theories of language, imagery, and gesture in the contexts of Western philosophy, German literature, and Jewish thought.

Before now, no work in any language has brought Sachs and Benjamin scholarship together under a single cover. Looking at these two internationally known and celebrated authors together reconfigures both the ways we understand them-- neither just "Jewish writers," nor indifferently German authors--and the ways we understand German literature.

Timothy Bahti is Associate Professor of German and Comparative Literature, University of Michigan. Marilyn Sibley Fries was Associate Professor of German and Women's Studies, University of Michigan.

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