Minnesota Books

There are two "bibles" for people who want to know about John Steinbeck - Jackson Benson's biography and this one. Personally, I prefer this one because it covers the golden age of Steinbeck and his friendship with marine biologist, philosopher and brilliant mind, Ed Ricketts.

If you've read Cannery Row and Grapes of Wrath (among others), you've gotten a glimpse of Ed RIcketts. In Richard Astro's book, you get the "toto-picture" of the man. Steinbeck's literature has been called simple. Yeah, simple as a Zen painting. Richard Astro shows how the collective (and at times drastically different) philosophies of these two men spawned one to create some of the greatest stories ever told. Stories that can be read and appreciated by a kid in middle school and then upon rereading, it is discovered how many layers lie beneath the tightly plotted tales. Astro's book digs deep too and is a valuable, readible and thought provoking journey into a remarkable friendship.

Radically, Deleuze follows De Quincey's *The Last days of Emmanuel Kant* by casting the later Kant as a grizzly King Lear of sorts, exiled from his "reasonable" philosophical kingdom and stepping precariously to a mad song of Romantic apperception. Hamlet's "time out of joint" becomes the unhinged temporality of movement subordinated and conditioned by time, or the Borgesian "labyrinth which is composed of a single straight line, and which is indivisible, incessant." While Rimbaud's "I is another" becomes the form under which the I affects the ego, or the mind affecting itself, an interiorized temporality that constantly divides us from ourselves, "a giddiness, an oscillation which constitutes time"(ix). Kafka's "The Good is what the Law says" reminds us that there is nothing to "know" in the law, simply that it *is*, and that we only come across this "ism" through action and execution, by which we must deduce the Good. Finally, Rimbaud's "disorder of all the senses" becomes that autopoetic civil war of the faculties pushing themselves to act and cooperate in unique and unprecedented ways, leading one faculty to an achievement or realization it would never have had on its own, pushing the known boundaries of genius and creativity, onward to mutation.

This is a "brief" treatise whose length should not be underestimated. As always, Deleuze's exegetical style is diamond-sharp, tracing an analytical razorline through the architectontic reversals of Kant's ever-burgeoning spiritual maturity, from the brilliant technician and moral demiurge of the first two critiques, to the wild, discordant Kant of old age.

For those uncomfortable with Deleuze's controversial approach to Nietzsche and Spinoza, this volume is much more Kantian than Deleuzian. But its originalities are impossible to deny, its exegetical precision a godsend. Deleuze's extraordinary personality is stamped on every page, while the unchained spirit of the later Kant shines provocatively through. This treatise should be special-ordered for all university courses on Kant's philosophy. It is an outstanding 20th-century reaction to a now misappropriated philosophical visionary, the grandeur of whose final work is too often obscured by the first two Critiques, which are merely its prologue or conceptual training-ground.

Deleuze organizes the three Critiques around the core notion of faculties and the objects over which they legislate. For example, understanding legislates in the faculty of knowledge, while reason operates over the faculty of desire; taken individually, the study of each makes up the content of the first two of Kant's celebrated Critiques. Their respective functions are shown by Deleuze to culminate in the third Critique (i.e. *Critique of Pure Judgement*), wherein the notion of "ends", both moral and cognitive, reach synthetic fulfillment. Hence, it is in the third Critique, instead of the first two, in which the capstone of Kant's Copernican revolution is reached. Here in the arena of art and aesthetics, no faculty legislates, nor are generic objects present. Rather aesthetic judgement involves the faculties and imagination in a kind of free play aimed at some type of overall harmony. Rather than knowledge, which can only be phenomenal, culture represents humankind's highest achievement and its measurement; and the highway into 19th century Romanticism opens.

Kant is a giant of Western philosophy. This book aids in an understanding of his overall undertaking.

It was interesting to read about some of the options people had besides the Panthers, to hear the view of taking responsibilty, not only blaming the man for the situation. And to reaffirm the idea that a great shift in society needs to occur before we can have true equality.

NO JUSTICE, NO PEACE!

For anyone who has ever wanted to work for social change, this life story by a wise and vital woman is a guidebook. As the book's cover tells us, "Grace Lee Boggs is a first-generation Chinese American who has been a speaker, writer, and movement activist in the African- American community for fifty-five years." After earning her Ph.D. in philosophy at Bryn Mawr in June of 1940, Grace wanted to become an activist. She moved to Chicago in the fall of 1940 and began working with the South Side Tenants Organization--a group that had been set up by the Workers Party.

When distinguished "labor leader A. Phillip Randolph issued a call for blacks all over the country to march on Washington to demand jobs in the defense plants," more and more people began attending the Workers Party discussions in Chicago's Washington Park. Grace had been invited to participate in those discussions. She said, "The more I went out in the community and met people, the more inadequate I was beginning to feel." When Randolph's leadership of the March on Washington movement was successful and President Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802, Grace realized "the power that the black community has within itself to change this country when it begins to move. As a result, I decided that what I wanted to do with the rest of my life was to become a movement activist in the black community." To Grace, "Joining the Workers Party seemed a good way to start," and that's what she did, in order to get the political education she felt she needed.

In the 1950s, Grace moved to Detroit where she worked on the Socialist Workers Party newsletter and met Jimmy Boggs, "A rank-and-file black Chrysler-Jefferson worker and community activist." Grace liked living in Detroit because it "felt like a 'Movement' city where radical history had been made and could be made again." She also liked working with Jimmy. Having worked closely with C. L. R. James, the intellectually powerful Socialist philosopher, Grace felt that her life had been "exciting but also extremely intellectual." She reasoned that she "needed to return to the concrete." Grace and Jimmy married in 1953 and began a life together that was rooted in the concrete reality of a major 20th-century industrialized city that had been abandoned by the large corporations that built it and by much of its white population.

As Ossie Davis says in his foreword to Grace's book, "Through these pages walk causes, gatherings, confrontations, movements, and the men and women who made them: workers and students and committees of the People...." Studs Terkel has called Grace's book "More than a deeply moving memoir...." He said, "...this is a book of revelation."

It is just that, for with passion and reason, Grace invites us to join her and Jimmy. She shows how they made "Detroit Summer" and "Gardening Angels" part of a new urban economic system, and she shows us how to interact multiculturally and multi-generationally. She doesn't merely talk about it--she does it and reports on its results. Grace Boggs educates us in her book and helps us see the possibilities of what we can do in our own cities.