jim submits ""Socratic Apology:

A Wonderful, Horrible Life of Hans-Georg Gadamer"

Richard Wolin, Bookforum

reviewing Hans-Georg Gadamer: A Biography by Jean Grondin, trasnlateed by Joel Weinsheimer, New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 480 pages. 

The philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer was a modern Methuselah. He was born on February 11, 1900, and died on March 13, 2002. During his lifetime he witnessed two world wars, Hitler's seizure of power, the collapse of communism, and the reunification of Germany. In one of his final interviews, published in the German daily Die Welt, he even commented on the events of 9/11. Although Gadamer officially retired from the University of Heidelberg in 1968, this proved to be the beginning of a momentous second career. Thereafter, he was a frequent lecturer at North American universities, bringing the tidings of "hermeneutics" — the art of textual interpretation — to a new generation of students who felt alienated from indigenous American intellectual traditions.

As it so happens, I was one of them. My encounter with Gadamer occurred at a rather forsaken outpost of higher learning in Hamilton, Ontario: McMaster University. Gadamer, then age seventy-six, still had a long and productive life ahead of him. At McMaster, he taught a weekly graduate seminar on a relatively minor Platonic dialogue, the Philebus, which we read aloud line by line. Little did I know it at the time, but in the class Gadamer had reprised the theme of his Habilitation, which he had completed nearly fifty years earlier under the supervision of University of Marburg classicist Paul Friedländer.

nolympics submits:

"Back to the Motherland: Cuba in Africa"
Christian Parenti. Published by Monthly Review.

reviewiing Piero Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959–1976 (University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 576 pages, cloth $34.95, paper $24.95

Angola is by most accounts a decimated, nearly hopeless land, ruined by more than three decades of war. But there was a moment in the mid-seventies when this former Portuguese colony shone as a beacon of hope for all Africa. It was here that the mythic power of white military supremacy was smashed by black troops from Angola and Cuba. And though the role of Cuban volunteers in this victory inspired Africans and left internationals everywhere, the details of the story have remained largely hidden and even in Cuba, uncelebrated.

Historian Piero Gleijeses’ new book, Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959–1976, recovers this politically far away time. It is a truly impressive accomplishment, based on ten years of research using declassified U.S. intelligence, interviews with principal players, and most importantly, vaults of never before revealed Cuban documents from the Communist Party Central Committee, armed forces, and foreign ministry. This highly detailed but superbly told story recounts Cuba’s many bold, often noble, sometimes successful interventions in Africa. The operations ranged from briefly aiding revolutionary Algeria under Ahmed Ben Bella; fighting and doctoring with Amilcar Cabral’s guerrillas in Guinea Bissau; and Che’s lost year in the Congo with the demoralized rank and file of Laurent Kabila’s Simbas; to Cuba’s finest hour, outgunned and outnumbered, on the battlefields of Angola. This last adventure forms the heart of the book and was Cuba’s largest engagement, thus its details are worth recounting.