Walter Benjamin has progressed over the years from an obscure lesser member of the Frankfurt School to a widely read leading member of that obscure school. Aided by such as Hannah Arendt, who introduced him to a wider audience in her writings (and also to me), readers have come to appreciate Benjamin for the beauty of his writing as well as his sharp insight.

This volume, along with its companion, is an excellent introduction to the style and thought of this man who, while out of step with his times, possessed the insight to give those times an original critique.

Possessed of a lively style and free from the Marxist bagge that weighs down his Frankfurt School colleagues such as Adorno and Horkheimer (I think Benjamin owes much more to Heidegger than Marx), Benjamin will hook any reader who takes the time to spend an hour or two with this book. From here it's an easy step to purchase other Benjamin writings, a step I can almost guarantee.

While his work is as important as Barthes, Foucault, or Derrida, or any other critic of the 20th Century, Benjamin's work has a mystical quality, a kind of enchantment, that resonates much more than any other critic I have read. It is always human and sensitive, even despite his determinedly impersonal tone.

When I think of Benjamin, I think of Emerson's famous line about Hawthorne - that he was a greater man than any of his works betray. The integrity and character of Walter Benjamin shines through his works, and is an inspiration to anyone who takes literature seriously.

This first volume of Bejamin's complete works is very attractive and welcome. Some of my favorite essays are present, such as his essays on children's literature, and the nature of language. I eagerly await the other two volumes.

An excellent book, finally Banjamin on photography and cinema is available in english. Reading his essay on Chaplin is extremely illuminating concerning the question of the passage from silent film to sound film. His concept of critique, as well as his concept of "making history" lies in this text.

This book is a nihilistic, incoherent work, and I dare anyone who reads this review to argue to the contrary. Admiration for this book is humbuggery in action. The emperor has no clothes.

In the fifth of his "Theses on History" Benjamin mentions that "every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disapear irretrievably." This work represents a significant way of not forgetting. It is fragmentary...but it reminds us that the texts we read are all fragmentary, and we assemble and contextualize them as we read them.

Herbert Muschamp, the NY Times architectural critic, has written an interesting article about Benjamin and his Paris project which appears in the Arts & Leisure section on January 16, 2000. While not strictly speaking a book review it nevertheless offers some observations as to the cultural importance of Benjamin's chef d'oevre. Another book on the Arcades Project is Susan Buck-Morss's 'The Dialectics of Seeing' (MIT 1989, 1991, 1997).