I didn't know much about Hannah Arendt but kept coming across her name, this is a short introduction as to why she is famous. She is part of that post-war question to understand what went wrong in Germany and what might be done to stop it from happening again. Here we are again in Ukraine, Arendt has something to say on the failure to think clearly, or as she says the banality of evil. ( )

Hannah Arendt is pretty much the definition of complicated; I'd read several of her books but knew little about her life (other than philosophy student, pretty assimilated in high German culture, Jewish, WW2, and then subject of a lot of intra-communal hate over her writings about the Eichmann trial). I had no idea she'd dated Heidegger (who was apparently both a player and a nazi himself...), etc.

There's nothing really useful here other than just a more full appreciation of a historical figure (the same time would be better spent actually reading her books), but it was still interesting. ( )

The life and the work of Hannah Arendt appears interwoven in this short book. Anne Heller refers the main events of Arendt's life and discuss some of her most important books. Giving context to "Eichmann in Jerusalem" and "The Origins of Totalitarianism", the author provides useful tools to comprehend it. Arendt's ideas, in many aspects beyond the time in which they were exposed, emerge in a comprehensive way in this introductory work. ( )

Life is complicated, and so is evil

Hannah Arendt: A Life in Dark Times by Anne C. Heller (New Harvest, $20).

The most recent in New Harvest Publishing’s Icons series of short biographies of giants in philosophy, science and the arts is Hannah Arendt: A Life in Dark Times by Anne C. Heller.

While it’s not comprehensive—impossible, in a mere 150 pages—it does provide a very good overview of Arendt’s remarkable and controversial life. Heller does an excellent job of covering the outrage that surrounded Arendt’s reporting on the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann for the New Yorker (later expanded and published as Eichmann in Jerusalem: The Banality of Evil), as well as illuminating the posthumous discovery of her affair with Nazi philosopher Martin Heidegger, situating both in Arendt’s life experience.

This is a well-written and concise introduction to a fascinating life.

(Reviewed on Lit/Rant: www.litrant.tumblr.com) ( )

“Things looked different after she had looked at them”

Short but deeply fascinating, this book about Hannah Arendt covers both her life and the evolution of her thinking in less than 140 pages. It opens with the controversy surrounding her coverage of the 1961 trial of Nazi officer Adolf Eichmann in Israel, and her pithy but divisive “banality of evil” observation, then cycles back to her turn of the century childhood in Prussia, where her highly educated, politically liberal, religiously agnostic family had established itself several generations previously after leaving czarist Russia.

Even as a child it was obvious Arendt possessed a prodigious intellect, but unsurprisingly that did not make her life easy. Her father died when she was seven and she had to flee Nazi Germany as a young woman, resettling first in Paris and later in the United States. Before leaving Germany she studied and had an affair with the Nazi involved philosopher Martin Heidegger, a relationship she had trouble renouncing even as she embraced her Jewish roots more and more avidly.

I was drawn right into this book. It was refreshing to read about someone devoted to the life of the mind rather than the pursuit of fame, political power, or wealth. Even though the book is not long it doesn’t feel slight because it plunges right into the heart of Arendt’s life and intellectual development. I have never read a book so copiously footnoted, all the author’s sources are cited right there in the text, which I appreciate but it did take some initial effort to not be distracted by them.

“Things looked different after she had looked at them . . . Thinking was her passion, and thinking for her was a moral activity.” Philosopher Hans Jonas on Hannah Arendt ( )