I view this book differently from the critical reviewer. One wonders, first of all, how "straightforward" such a book, treating as it does the whole range of Adorno's thought, can really be. There is no shortage of books out there on Adorno and the Frankfurt School- Martin Jay and David Held come immediately to mind. It should be borne in mind that Adorno is one of the great thinkers of his time and his thought is difficult, no matter how well explained, and there is no point unless reading such a book is in conjunction with reading Adorno himself. While of course he enjoys position of a late-comer to Adorno interpretation, many difficulties having already been resolved or well thrashed out, Jarvis's book is more than just a good digest of conventional wisdom. He is the best guide into the most difficult of Adorno's texts, Negative Dialectics. His training in German Idealism, manifestly evident, though not ostentatiously paraded, allows him to mediate Adorno to others sure-footedly and with clarity. The other great strength of the book is its familiarity with the German scholarship on Adorno. The shortcoming of his book is that Jarvis treats Adorno as a philosopher first a critical theorist second. Adorno is a thinker committed to thinking the possibility (or impossibility) of fundamental social transformation, what he refers to as reconciliation. As such, he is a critic of capitalist society. Jarvis assumes that the Marxian tradition on which Adorno draws almost necessarily falls into pre-critical or pre-deconstructive and that that it requires philosophical grounding is misleading as is, in consequence, his treatment of this "dimension" of Adorno's thought. The early chapters devoted to this are the weakest of what is, nonetheless, an excellent book.