Karl Jaspers: A Biography--Navigations in Truth

Rating:
Summary: Inspirational
Review: I have read every work of the late Karl Jaspers. I believe Ms. Kirkbright summarizes her approach in her introduction. She chooses a difficult path to explore. She must write about Jasper's life without focusing on his specific philosophy. She explains in the introduction that she will write about Jaspers seeking truth without going into detail about his idea of truth. Personally I can not put the book down, but I keep reading and reading. Too many academic snobs keep trying to kill the spirit of philosophy. Why is it wrong to look at Karl Jaspers through the lens of his family correspondence? I recommend this book to anyone who is interesting in learning about the man who wrote so much philosophy and began the long tradition known as existentialism. I do not recommend this book to anyone who is too pretentious to actually read a book!

Rating:
Summary: A Flawed Biography
Review: In general, I do not like to post negative reviews to the Amazon Web site. For Suzanne Kirkbright's work, I am making an exception. This is a very poorly written and narrated biography. Very briefly, I would like to itemize its most obvious flaws,

1. Writing. Ms Kirkbright writes in an English that is all but incomprehensible. The book reads like an inept translation. Here are the first two sentences of the book:

"In Oldenburg, where Karl Jaspers was born on 23 February 1883, the changing attitudes that shape the fabric of civilized society were all but sheltered from view. (footnote 1) During these years of Bismark's Germany, political life was in flux, for modernizing the regions in a federal, secular and unified nation appeared to exacerbate disagreement among political parties which--apart from the higher authority of Emperor Willhelm I--could have been scrutinizing Bismarck's policies of social and cultural integration. (footnote 2)"

Throughtout her book, Ms Kirkbright has trouble with standard English idioms and the use of prepositions. One has to wonder how this prose slipped passed the editorial staff at YUP.

2. Historical. Ms Kirkbright's rendering of the historical and cultural background of Jasper's place and time is substandard.

3. Narrative. This biography achieves no smooth narrative but skips around and does not build any kind of systematic portrait of anything--not the family, not Karl, not the political events.

4. Ideas. Mr Kirkbright seems to have little understanding of the ideas that circulate in Jaspers work. She seems to be culling them from secondary sources rather than from her own reading and understanding.

5. Research. Ms Kirkbright is working on a fascinating subject with many primary sources. However, she uses these sources in a very unskilled way. She has the tendency to footnote sentence after sentence, often with no serious goal.

6. Bibliographical. Her reference section is not up to contemporary scholarly standards. One rather humorous example is her reference to "The Complete Works of Plato"...in the Jowett translation. Hmmm...?

In conclusion, because of its awkwardness this book is hard to follow for a someone who simply wants to know a bit about Jaspers; for the scholar, it's probably worth a quick glance because of the value of Suzanne Kirkbright's source material.

All in all, this is a poor book that needs revision

rs