Hannah Arendt: A Life in Dark Times (Icons) - Hardcover

Heller, Anne C.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 054445619X ISBN 13: 9780544456198

Publisher: New Harvest, 2015

Synopsis

Hannah Arendt, one of the most gifted and provocative voices of her era, was a polarizing cultural theorist--extolled by her peers as a visionary and berated by her critics as a poseur and a fraud. Born in Prussia to assimilated Jewish parents, she escaped from Hitler's Germany in 1933 and is now best remembered for the storm of controversy that arose after the publication of her 1963 New Yorker series on the trial of the kidnapped Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann. Arendt was a woman of many contradictions. She was brilliant, beautiful when young, and irresistible to gifted men, even in her chain-smoking, intellectually provocative middle age. She learned to write in English only at the age of thirty-six, and yet her first book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, single-handedly altered the way generations of Americans and Europeans viewed fascism and genocide. Her most famous--and most divisive--work, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, created fierce controversy that continues to this day, exacerbated by the posthumous discovery that she had been the lover of the great romantic philosopher and Nazi sympathizer Martin Heidegger. In this fast-paced, comprehensive biography, Anne C. Heller tracks the source of Arendt's apparent contradictions and her greatest achievements to her sense of being what she called a "conscious pariah"--one of those few people in every time and place who doesn't "lose confidence in ourselves if society does not approve us" and will not "pay any price" to gain the acceptance of others.

About this title

Review:

“Hannah Arendt was one of the most compelling and provocative thinkers of her time, and she remains indispensable today. In this lucid, accessible biography, Anne Heller shows how Arendt’s eventful life—shaped by war and exile, love and friendship—gave rise to her most important insights into politics and the nature of evil.” —Adam Kirsch, author of Rocket and Lightship: Essays on Literature and Ideas

“‘Outlaw’ philosopher, journalist-provocateur, captivating fixture in Manhattan salons, Hannah Arendt was quite possibly the dominant émigré in a time when European refugees set the tone of American intellectual and literary life. Anne Heller’s elegant biography is a triumph of assured storytelling: concise yet sweeping, finely detailed, large in scope, at once clear-eyed and deeply sympathetic. We feel Arendt’s presence on every page.” —Sam Tanenhaus, author of Whittaker Chambers: A Biography

“A well-wrought portrait of Arendt as a rootless woman who nevertheless established strong friendships and included a large circle of followers.” —Publishers Weekly

“An evenhanded, sympathetic biography of a defiant thinker.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Anne C. Heller illuminates Hannah Arendt” —Vanity Fair

“I thought I had a general idea of Arendt’s thought and life. Ann C. Heller’s immensely readable 132-page biography showed me how little I knew—this is a book of ideas, but it’s also about a series of great romances.” —Jesse Kornbluth, Head Butler

“A sympathetic account of Arendt’s lifelong quest to explain ‘the kinds of thinking, judging, and acting conscious people must partake in to be members in good standing of a diverse and moral human race.’” —Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

About the Author:

ANNE HELLER, a former journalist and magazine editor, is the author of Ayn Rand and the World She Made.

About this edition

• Publisher: New Harvest
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 054445619X
• ISBN 13: 9780544456198
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 134