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Rating: 
Summary: One of the great men of the 20th century
Review: Amery was not French. He was an Austrian Jew who immigrated to Belgium and joined the resistance in the late 1930s. He was captured in 1943 and tortured in Auschwitz, but survived to make the experience the subject of his greatest work, published in English as "At the Mind's Limits." After the war he moved permanently to Belgium and discarded his German name (Hans Mayer), replacing it with the French name under which his subsequent works were published. Like so many survivors of Nazi torture, he ended his own life. The essays in this collection are not profound in the same way as his Auschwitz book, but they describe the workings of a brilliant mind confronting a universal experience. They are worthy of our highest respect.
Rating: 
Summary: Typical French drivel: abstruse, pretentious, wordy.
Review: Nietzsche's ascerbic and derisory "Das schreibt und schreibt sein unausstehlich weises Larifari, Als gält es primum scribere,
Deinde philosophari" could serve as a fitting epigraph to this abstruse, boring compendium of vague, disjoint, and specious theorisings, whereby the laboured gravitas fails to obscure the fact that the author has nothing to say (as is usually the case.) I lost interest in the book by the page 30, quit reading it on page 50, then thumbed through the rest, then contemplated a bit--was I perhaps being too hasty with conclusions? then reread a few pages and decided that I was not--and then, with certainty and relief, deposited it in the circular file where it belongs. The book is a perfect example of what's wrong with a lot of continental philosophy. Or "philosophy", better put.
Rating:
Summary: Typical French drivel: abstruse, pretentious, wordy.
Review: Nietzsche's ascerbic and derisory "Das schreibt und schreibt sein unausstehlich weises Larifari, Als gält es primum scribere,
Deinde philosophari" could serve as a fitting epigraph to this abstruse, boring compendium of vague, disjoint, and specious theorisings, whereby the laboured gravitas fails to obscure the fact that the author has nothing to say (as is usually the case.) I lost interest in the book by the page 30, quit reading it on page 50, then thumbed through the rest, then contemplated a bit--was I perhaps being too hasty with conclusions? then reread a few pages and decided that I was not--and then, with certainty and relief, deposited it in the circular file where it belongs. The book is a perfect example of what's wrong with a lot of continental philosophy. Or "philosophy", better put.
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