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Title: The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell by Bertrand Arthur Russell ISBN: 0-415-22862-X Publisher: Routledge Pub. Date: May, 2000 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.83 (6 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: A Model Autobiography
Comment: Considering that Russell lived such a long life, and an eventful one, and that this book (a compilation of three volumes) covers most of it, it's a long one. But eminently worth it.
As always, Russell's style is brilliant. Simple yet deep, elegant and unadorned, always fresh and looking at things objectively yet with deep feeling.
The book is always informative, engaging, and frequently hilarious.
One of the nicer things about the book is the inclusion of some letters from others. Usually these are luminaries. The one from Will Durant, together with Russell's curt rejoinder, is marvelous.
Russell has the knack of taking what could become boastful incidents--his imprisonment for objecting to WWI, his hair-breadth escape when his plane went down near Norway in WWII--and turning them into humorous, self-effacing ones.
He also has the knack of talking about horrendous personal difficulties in a way that is objective and nonjudgmental.
Rating: 4
Summary: Gossipy, passionate, and thoughtful.
Comment: One gets the impression, as one reads the brilliant character sketches Russell draws of the scholars and lords and ladies who made up his circle of aquaintances, that the English upper class was mostly mad, scoundrels, or geniuses, with a fair amount of overlap. (The author as an outstanding case in point.) The keenness of Russell's insight into character, vivid descriptions, and eye for the absurd, make many passages of this book a delight. "My advice to anyone who wishes to write is to know the very best literature by heart, and ignore the rest as completely as possible." "The past is an aweful God, though he gives life almost the whole of its haunting beauty." "(Plato's) austerity in matters of art pleases me, for it does not seem to be the easy condemnation that comes from the Phillistine." Reading Why I am Not a Christian ..., I got the impression that he had a gloomy outlook on life. But here, I often found great joy in poetry, nature, and the wonder of life. "I had never, till that moment, heard of Blake, and the poem affected me so much that I became dizzy and had to lean against the wall." Tempered, however, by morbid thoughts, and fear of insanity.
One of the odder aspects of the book to me was Russell's "idealism." On one page, he speaks of a mystical experience in which gave him a universal compassion for all mankind: on the very next page, he relates how he "fell out of love" with his wife, and then, how he ditched her. Passing from the same Bodhissattva-like musings elsewhere, he relates, on the next page or so, how he tried to strangle a friend in a rage. He can be sympathetic and even kind, but for a would-be Boddhisattva and fighter for the rights of women, he seems to have hurt a lot of ladies, in particular, rather badly. Yet his friendships in general, with both sexes, seem warm and affectionate.
I docked the book a star because the version I bought (Bantom) seemed dishonest in its packaging. The front and back covers show an old man, though this version only covers the period to 1914. On the back cover, it promises "more exciting episodes than most novels, details more intimate than most exposes, and more intensity of emotion than most fiction writers would dare ascribe to a single hero." Largely hype. This is not Dumas, or Augustine. It's a different kind of story.
Someone else on the back cover calls Russell "a Genius-Saint." Genius, maybe, but the second accolade implies very low standards for sainthood. The book did make me think Russell a more balanced figure than I thought. But part of that balance appears to have been something like madness, and something like cruelty. Intellectually, Russell was a brilliant man. Emotionally, he often strikes me as a lonely and bewildered child, angry at being abandoned, not sure where to look for love, and not sure how to give it.
author, Jesus and the Religions of Man
Rating: 5
Summary: Entertaining, illuminating piece of philosophy
Comment: One may hypothesize that all works of philosophy are in essence works of self-reflection. From blatant examples such as Augustine's "Confessions" to more subtle parts of Descartes' "Meditations," philosophers have often used their own experiences to help us understand the world we live in. In this sense, we can contrast to the former works the works of philosophers such as Aristotle or Heidegger who shy away from using the first person and deal with subject matters not only strictly of interest to the writer, but which seek to gain popular understanding. Bertrand Russell is a curious mixture of the two approaches. His committment to objectivity and to rigorous thought that is arguably impossible without a certain degree of "common ground" frequently seems to overshadow his own subjectivist foundations in which he approaches the questions of philosophy. In what is perhaps the most powerful two pages of the book, at the introduction, Russell outlines three primary principles that have motivitated him to do what he did in life. In a sense, then, the autobiography provides the reader with comforting answers as to why anybody would wish to live such an amazing life. In this sense, it is perhaps Russell's most self-reflective work of philosophy. The book is entertaining, the stories enjoyable, and the message deeply profound: how Russell came to appreciate the fields that he was interested in, and how he found the principles that guided his life. He had also been kind enough, in the edition I read, to include copies of letters of correspondence and pages from his diary as a youth. While this may have been motivated by a less-than-humble desire to provide future scholars with primary source material to study himself, they are themselves works of philosophy, and many of the doubts about life Russell struggled with as a youth strike a chord in all of us. Indeed, Russell's Autobiography is an entertaining and personally illuminating approach to one of the most fundamental philosophical questions of how one's life is to be lead.
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Title: Why I Am Not a Christian : And Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects by Bertrand Russell ISBN: 0671203231 Publisher: Touchstone Books Pub. Date: 30 October, 1967 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: The Conquest of Happiness by Bertrand Arthur Russell ISBN: 0871401622 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: February, 1996 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: The History of Western Philosophy by Bertrand Russell ISBN: 0671201581 Publisher: Touchstone Books List Price(USD): $24.00 |
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Title: Religion and Science by Bertrand Arthur Russell, Michael Ruse ISBN: 0195115511 Publisher: Oxford Press Pub. Date: March, 1997 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
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Title: Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits by Bertrand Arthur Russell ISBN: 0415083028 Publisher: Routledge Pub. Date: August, 1994 List Price(USD): $33.95 |
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