Autobiography

Rating:
Summary: A Model Autobiography
Review: 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:
Summary: A Model Autobiography
Review: 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:
Summary: A first-class philosopher, a second- class human being
Review: For most reviewers Bertrand Russell's cruelty in a number of his personal relationships, especially with women is a minor motif of a very extraordinary life. I understand that point -of- view. There is so so much in Russell's life and thought that inspires admiration. He is by all accounts a great philosopher. He was a truly masterful writer, and his 'History of Western Philosophy'did the seeming impossible and made reading about the subject interesting and entertaining. Russell was a maverick and went his own way in the world of political thought. He may have been a fool when it came to Communism but he surely was right to see the dangers of a nuclear world, and courageous to fight against them. His zest for life, his ability to appreciate and enjoy so many things in life is certainly an admirable quality. He wrote with vigor and clarity and often great wit and humor. He could recognize the value of others, as for instance in his championing of Wittgenstein. He did seem deeply disturbed by human suffering and care deeply to somehow lessen it. Yet the personal cruelty stands strongly against him, and he would seem to join a long list including Marx and Gandhi of ' cruel humanitarians' . His atheism too disturbs me because he shows so little emotional understanding of the needs of religious believers. Russell was very thin and that thinness seems to me to somehow capture something of his essence, also his prose. He lacks a certain complexity, a certain kind of depth that comes in going deeper inside the heart and soul. He was a very great thinker, and writer but I do not believe that as a human being he had the highest kind of feeling and understanding for others. Perhaps one of the greatest 'flat characters'of the twentieth century, a century which also had a few 'rounded ones' of greater human complexity and intensity.

Rating:
Summary: From mathematician to conscientious objector - quite a life
Review: Not only was Bertrand Russell a gentleman, he was a peer. In some cases this can be seen as stepping out of the frying pan into the fire. In Lord Russell's case, it just may have helped.

Apart from stating the obvious, that Bertrand Russell needs or should need little introduction, it is as well to say that his long life was spent, as far as it was public, in defending or promoting causes. Having gone to prison at a young age because he could not stomach the Kaiser's war (at least not quietly), he later returned, if only briefly, way off in the 1960s, defending the cause of CND in Trafalgar Square. That's quite a bit of history to cover, all from the same angle. It seems he never regretted the stand he took, nor altered his views substantially over the decades. He either had to condemn war openly and publicly, or condemn man privately, which meant taking his own life, something he says he thought about very seriously and decided against. For all his faults, whatever they were, it's quite hard to fault him!

The autobiography allows us to accompany him through the bulk of the twentieth century and see the development of various movements worldwide, in which he was always involved, at least at the level of the heart, but often actively. He uses letters a good deal in this text, and these throw light on that outer world which was so often pulling in an almost opposite direction. Yet he had his friends and in the bad years when he was a political outcast, a pariah of sorts in his own college (Trinity College, Cambridge) there were always those who could see his point of view and respect it. He was a stubborn man and his stubbornness allowed him to hang on for much longer than most people would have bothered. In fact, it seems that he remained true to himself right to the end, and in the end, that is what gave him life. An interesting book about a lively intelligence, sometimes brilliantly displayed.

Rating:
Summary: Gossipy, passionate, and thoughtful.
Review: 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:
Summary: Entertaining, illuminating piece of philosophy
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Entertaining, illuminating piece of philosophy
Review: 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.