Ms. Ushpiz is determined to rescue her subject from the banality of biography. The details of Arendt’s childhood, education, romantic life and professional activity are not ignored, but they nearly always illuminate her ideas.
This solid intellectual biography painstakingly follows the development of Arendt’s thought as she was forced to flee her privileged surroundings in German academia, where she was Martin Heidegger’s student and lover, to France and then the United States.
60
Village VoiceMichelle Orange
Village VoiceMichelle Orange
Insofar as Ushpiz succeeds in putting the most provocative, salient, and damning aspects of Arendt's work into a lucid context, she exposes the limits of her own approach.
50
Slant MagazineClayton Dillard
Slant MagazineClayton Dillard
It reduces its historical moment to a series of vignettes and voiceovers, each evincing a curiously tone-deaf sentimentality.