This is the story of the journey of an idea - that of engineering a society conceived as an organism - from its roots in the romantic movement with Michelet to Lenin, the ultimate man of action, on the threshold of power. Only Edmund Wilson, whose erudition as an autodidact was unsurpassed in his time, could have pulled this off: the ideas and inspiration pulse with life on every page. You get to know Marx, ENgels, and scores of other characters intimately as they dream of building a socialist order that would fundamentally re-order society and its economy. WHile I was never a sympathiser for communism, this most certainly gave me a feeling for the seductive beauty of the dream. THere is even a forward by Wilson, who admits to being overly optimistic, that what he chronicled with such excitment actually led to "one of the most horrible tyrannies in the history of mankind." THis is intellectual history at its very best, freed in the hands of a master writer from the pedantry and puffery of academia, and unflinching in the audacity of its partisan interpretations. Also beautifully written, it is a window into the hopes and dream of the 20C.

Warmly recommended.

It is a singularly ironic fact that one of the most important books of the 20th century, written and published in 1940 by one of its most perceptive, intellectually gifted, and universally accepted authors, Edmund Wilson, would, until very recently, find itself sadly out of print. To my mind this is a scathing indictment of our current level of intellectual prowess. Or, perhaps it is more properly a reflection of the decreased public and academic interest in communism based on the collapse of the former Soviet Union as well as the curious transmogrification of China into some version of a politically correct socialist state practicing along the margins of capitalism. Yet in truth this book is such a marvel of intellectual achievement and writing skill that it should be read, if not devoured, by anyone with any serious interest in non-fiction writing as an avocation.

Edmund Wilson has suffered the same fate as the book, which is equally as curious. Of course, he was not as notorious as literary figure as one of his 20th century colleagues, H.L Mencken, who is still largely in print and in vogue, but Wilson so towers over all of his contemporaries that it is indeed mysterious that he has fallen into relative obscurity both as a writer and as a critic, as well. Yet Wilson was truly a renaissance figure, a gifted and talented poet, playwright, novelist, historian, and critical reviewer for a variety of magazines and periodicals such as the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and The New Republic, a man able to articulate his position with regard to a plethora of social and political issues with great power and verve.

Yet it was in tomes such as this that he achieved his greatest powers of exposition, in this penetrating, quite detailed, and absorbing review of all the chief philosophical, political, social and economic elements of the chief architects of the Soviet revolution. Wilson had been a great student and admirer of the collected works of Karl Marx, and brought his immense intellectual and reporting skills to bear in describing the men, the ideas, and the issues of the so-called October revolution of 1918. It is the single best source of information regarding all of the various components of the massively important revolutionary process, neatly synthesizing the ways in which the various personalities, political circumstances, philosophical predispositions, and historical happenstance combined in the moist unlikely of revolutions in what Karl Marx considered one of the least likely of states, one so rural, so backward, and so vastly composed of uneducated ragged proletariat.

And in this stunning exploration we find new reason to understand and appreciate the power of individual personalities in the historical process, and the way that exceptional figures like Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin, and the ways in which various aspects of Marxist theory were used and abused in promulgating what would become Soviet socialism's dogmatic approach to creating a worker's paradise. As we thread our way through the particulars of Marxian theory Wilson is so intricately familiar with, we begin to understand his fascination with both Marx's genius and the subtleties of Marx's exposition. Too many of us forget how bastardized and vulgarized the versions of Marxism promulgated by Stalin were, and how much they worked against the inexorable truths Marx found ticking away in the universal time-clock he saw operating behind history's time.

So, too, is Wilson's examination of Lenin a wondrous thing to read through, with his thoughtful if perhaps too sympathetic explanations of Lenin's goals, motives, and frustrations in trying to set the revolution on course and on-mark with the needs of the modern socialist state he envisioned to grow from the original seizure of power. Unfortunately, he never lived to see the radical experiment through to its fruition, nor the fateful poisoning of the spirit of the revolution accomplished by Stalin in his paranoid and sociopathic manipulations and purges. This is an absolutely magnetic reading experience, one that will illustrate just how powerfully and how memorably a writer with extraordinary gifts and an incredible intellectual acumen can be. I highly recommend this book for anyone aspiring to a serious education about the events of the 20th century, of which the Soviet revolution of October 1918 is certainly an extraordinarily important part. Enjoy!

It has been twenty years since I read "To the Finland Station", a story of the rise of communist thinking, from its earliest beginnings to Lenin's triumphal return to St. Petersburg. I don't recall much of it, except this: it is the best work of history I have ever read.

Anyone who wants to know what it means to be a writer should read this book, regardless of his or her interest in the subject. As night follows from day, those who are interested should read it, as well. It is a perfect illustration for one who believes that how a story is told is ever as important as the story, itself, and who wants to study an example where both are exceptional.

The content will prove valuable to anyone concerned with modern world history.

Had to read this book for a college class. ... This is an awesome book. It's a military psychological thriller in which some POW US soldiers are brainwashed and sent home; all programmed to do damage to the government when they get there. Given that the men are war heroes, it isn't hard for them to get a foot in the door where they can really wreak havoc. The plot twists around in ways too creepy to be believed, yet too familiar to be completely discounted...heh heh heh. It's definitely readable as a thriller, but does good double duty as a quasi sci-fi conspiracy novel, not to mention the informed and responsible portrayal of US military intelligence. I wanted to call it Kurt Vonnegut meets Tom Clancy, but that's not doing it justice. Maybe it's out-of-print because it couldn't find a niche. Or maybe THEY don't want you to read it.

Why this book is out of print is a mystery. Track down a used copy or join a nearby library that has one. You won't be disappointed. Richard Condon delivers a masterpiece of political and psychological horror, inspired by the ridiculous heights of the Cold War and the scourge of McCarthyism. The book's tragic protagonist, Raymond Shaw, was a soldier in the Korean War. He was captured by the Chinese and hypnotized and made into a programmable assassin. But the most shocking aspects of the novel are not the brainwashing, but who truly sponsored it and whom Raymond is ultimately destined to assassinate. The intrigue and curve-ball plot of this book send the mind reeling, as poor Raymond is relentlessly manipulated by those who use him, while those who want to save him deal with insurmountable obstacles. For a book written in 1959 it is surprisingly harsh, with nasty political diatribes from Condon along with prostitution, hard drug use, incest, and also a level of sexism that seems over the top today. The most obvious example of that last issue is Raymond's incredibly loathsome mother, whose evil amply propels the story; but she is sometimes a little difficult to believe in her sheer evil megalomania. But other than that, for a political thriller that is impossible to put down, you can't do much better than this classic, and the finale is truly shocking and heartbreaking. This one is well worth tracking down.

For a person who does not like your Cold War spy novels I must admit that The Manchurian Candidate by Richard Condon is one of those rare books I consider to be simply brilliant. It is concise, very well-written, and has a story which is absolutely incredible (well okay, by today's standards it might be considered a bit over-the-top).

In The Manchurian Candidate we have a US platoon in Korea (during the war) captured by Chinese/Russian scientists who brainwash them. One sargeant in particular is targetted to be their assassin on demand after the war. This fellow happens to have a power-hungry mother (..to be kind; she is truly vile) and her bozo husband who is modelled after the commie-hating Senator McCarthy. From here the story gets more complex and interwoven, with a truly shocking and brilliant ending.

Bottom line: upon finishing this book you'll say "boy, that was GOOD". Compulsory reading.

(compared with the film adaptation of The Manchurian Candidate, the novel is superior ... as is often the case. However the film does capture the essence of the book albeit in a somewhat diluted fashion.)

The Metaphysical Club by Louis Menand is a tour de force of biography, history, and philosophy, and is so well-written that it kept me up for nights in a row reading it. The book focuses on four men, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey, their contemporaries, their philosophical musings, and the history of the U.S. from the Civil War to the early parts of the 20th Century. Whether you love it or hate it, pragmatism is one of the offspring of this long and complex piece of history. I like to tell people that I don't subscribe to any -ists or -isms, but I know that much of my personal philosophy stems from the thinking of these gentlemen and I found it interesting to see what their thinking was like, warts and all. I found that reading the book helped me put a lot of things I'd been thinking about into perspective. The United States of America is one of the greatest experiments ever conducted on the planet Earth. Often things have faltered [as it did in the Civil War], but bright and determined people have helped to see it through the low spots. The Metaphysical Club covers an important part of that story. I highly recommend this book.

Louis Menand - The Metaphysical Club

At the heart of "The Metaphysical Club" is the American Civil War, an epochal event which split America in two and forever scarred a generation of Americans. It was so profound an experience that many Americans would, like Oliver Wendell Holmes (one of the four "members" of the Metaphysical Club), drink libations each year in memory to their fallen countrymen. Such an experience rendered the old modes of thinking about life obsolete and after the Civil War Americans were in search of new ideas through which they might interpret and understand their existance and the society in which they lived. The discovery and development of these ideas is principal concern of Menand's book.

Pragamatism is the philosophy most closely connected to the post-war American generation, and it is around this philosophy which Menand constructs his narrative. Menand carefully shows how each of pragmatism's four principal developers (the four members of the Metaphysical Club, Holmes, Charles Pierce, William James, and John Dewey) contributed to making it a uniquely American response to the challenge posed by a new era.

And what a new era it was. Post Civil War America was filled with startling ideas such as evolution, determinism, psychoanalysis, and statistics. As Louis Agassiz, whose lectures on the superiority of the white race were delivered to packed audiences, could tell you Americans were fascinated by these ideas, some of which were used to solidify old myths, while others arose and threatened to overturn some of the most basic assumptions of human understanding. Menand skillfully relates these important ideas and draws on historical events to illustrate the logic and impact these new thoughts had on American society.

Portraits of the lives and times of the four principal figures in the development of American pragmatism - Oliver Wendell Holmes, Charles Pierce, William James, and John Dewey - are well-drawn and robust. The personal development of these four principals is traced, examining the events and conditions that helped build each man's pragmatist philosophy. Menand is concerned not only with telling each man's story, but in examining how each came to discover pragmatism for himself. The last section of the book unites each man's tale, bringing the four lives together in a beautiful synthesis of understanding and revelation.

Although these four figures are the focus of "The Metaphysical Club", Menand's book also creates a compelling picture of the post-Civil War generation by bringing alive several tributary characters including the eugenist Louis Agassiz, Charles Pierce's father, Benjamin, William James' brother and father, Henry and Henry, Sr., respectively, humanitarian Jane Addams, and the socialist Eugene Debs. The narrative is filled with interesting, even at times thrilling, anecdotes featuring these characters, each of which illustrate some crucial fact or idea.

Overall Menand's book points to where we (America) as a society have been and where he believes we are headed. The strong reception this book has received speaks to how many people agree with his analysis. After reading The Metaphysical Club do not be surprised to find yourself discovering that the very same ideas that captivated Americans of the post Civil War generation still figure most prominently into contemporary America.

As I was reading Thomas Friedman's "Latitudes and Attitudes," I kept coming back to Louis Menand's "Metaphysical Club," where a major theme is how we form beliefs; and how we are to navigate through life in a universe shot through with contingency. When an absolute belief dominates one's thinking, when theocracy is held high and democratic dissension is not allowed: violence results. This is as true today with the Islamic Jihad as it was in the antebellum US, when differing beliefs on race and slavery led to Civil War.

To appreciate this fully, one would need to read Menand's book. It isn't really about a philosophy club - indeed the club is hardly discussed. Nor is it a biography of the key members of that club - Oliver Wendell Holmes, William James, Chauncey Wright and Charles Sanders Pierce, John Dewey et. al. It's not even about an idea. It's about an approach to thinking - Pragmatism -"an account of the way people think - the way they come up with ideas, form beliefs and reach decisions." It's about the interplay of necessity, belief, free will and chance in the face of war, labor unrest and the dynamic growth of a young country.

This is not a biography in the usual sense. Indeed, the main characters are "Representative Men" in Emerson's sense - or - l'homme moyen -- " the average man" in The Queteletan, statistical sense. These are the men who "for a given era...represent everything that is grand, beautiful and good." The book begins with Holmes - whose story opens and closes the book. Holmes serves the story as an encapsulation of the changes in America, from antebellum Boston-Brahmin beliefs in absolutism and abolitionism to the Supreme Court Justice whose jurisprudence rests on hard-won experience and the first widespread use of the concept of "the reasonable" man.

This approach to biography was both fascinating and frustrating. Holmes is not Holmes, but the nexus of Emerson, the Civil War, and progressive politic in the court. William James serves as the point of departure for a comparison of the absolutisms of Agassiz vs. the contingency of Darwin, societal pluralism, race relations, and the assimilation of Eastern and Southern European immigrants into the American "race." Pierce is emblematic of the use of statistics in the analysis of personality traits (the Hetty Green case), and an object lesson in the clash of changing morals and a conservative academy. Dewey serves as the transition from the impractical Burlington (VT) school of Transcendental philosophy and Hegelianism (absolutisms) to a reformer of education, psychology, university-faculty tenure rights, sociology and labor practices.

All of these ideas and currents wend through the individual lives and times Menand covers. The overall narrative structure of this book is equally fascinating and frustrating. The reader is forever led down tangents that circle back and intersect with some other section, thought, event, or person covered elsewhere. In this way, the book really is a tapestry showing the warp and woof of American life.

Menand handles most of the people in this narrative in a dismissive and belittling manner: Emerson comes across as nothing more than a lapsed Unitarian who never really read a book but grabbed higgledy-piggledy for gems among the works of others. William James is a procrastinating, depressed dilettante and drug taker, a mystic who "discovered" Pragmatism in the works of a French philosopher, and then promptly dropped it (indeed, this reader got the sense that Pragmatism was not an original American idea at all but was derived from France). Eugene Debs is a drunk. All these things may be true of these men, but it is not the key to their greatness or why they are remembered today.

One thing I was not aware of which Menand covers at some length, is the degree to which American Transcendentalism derives from Coleridge's Aids to Reflection and how this in turn derives from Coleridge's misreading of Kant. I studied Coleridge, Kant, James and Emerson at Harvard Divinity School and still I didn't know this. Must of missed class that day (it was known to happen).

All in all, The Metaphysical Club was well worth the time invested. I heartily recommend it to anyone interested in the development of American cultural identity, history and philosophy. Of all the books I've read so far this year, this is the one I keep turning over in my mind. "The Metaphysical Club" is a thrilling, intellectual and cultural adventure. Highly recommended.

Collections of essays by intelligent, thoughtful people are always fun, or should be. But this is not the feeling one gets on reading this collection of essays by Louis Menand. This book is a reprint of essays that have appeared in such worthy journals as The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and the New Republic. We start with essays on William James and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Then we discuss T.S. Eliot's anti-semitism, Richard Wright and James Conant, as well as the New Yorker, and modern television. We read essays criticizing Pauline Kael and Christopher Lasch, a deflation of Larry Flynt, a look at the mind of Al Gore, and finally a piece on Vietnam War Memorial architect Maya Lin.

Yet compared to works by such other New Yorker and NYRB alumni such as Joan Didion, Renata Adler, and Anthony Lane, this book is a rather bloodless work. People who have read Menand in the past will regret the absence of his deflation of Camille Paglia, or his critical review of "Saving Private Ryan," as well as his dissections of such movies as "Independence Day," and "The Wings of the Dove." But the problem is not simply selection. In his informative essay on Lin he notes her view that one reason that her work is so emotionally effective is that she herself maintained her emotional detachment, and her apolitical views.

This view seems to have infected Menand's prose, with disappointing results. On the one hand Menand's review of Pauline Kael is not as memorable as Adler's ruthless polemic against her. (He writes that her reviews were not really "rereadable." Sometimes, sometimes not. Nor true, in my view, of her reviews of "A Clockwork Orange," or "The Godfather, Part Two.") His essay on television is much more complacent than Mark Crispin Miller. On the other hand his critical review of Christopher Lasch's "The True and Only Heaven," is not as acute as Stephen Holmes, or as informative as Jackson Lears' eulogy. But what is really problematic is something else. "The True and Only Heaven," is a deeply flawed book, but at least Lasch cared deeply about American democracy and its problems. At least Kael had a deep admiration for movies, and a genuine sense of disgust and anger at the way studios betray them. Menand not only does not share the same feelings, he does not really seem to care. There is little sense of intensity and passion, just a sense of superiority over a woman who should care so much about something as unimportant as popular movies.

Consider also the essay on Larry Flynt and Jerry Falwell. This is the sort of essay Bill Clinton would write on the topic if he were not an adulterer. There is criticism of both sides, and like much centrist rhetoric seeks to find an affinity between both "extremes." After all, lower class white male Southerners are both consumers of "Hustler" and evangelical Christians. True, but then so are many other sectors of the American population. And consider his essay on Al Gore. There are some subtle criticisms of Gore's stiffness and sententiousness. But there is no real feeling that a politician seeking to be the most powerful man on earth should show real imagination and vision. Perhaps one should move to the left of the Clinton-Gore consensus, but not too much more. One is reminded of a Feiffer cartoon from the 1960s, in which a "responsible" critic of the Vietnam War carries a sign requesting "A Little Less Bombing."

Isn't there anything he really likes? Menand's book on American pragmatism worked on the idea that pragmatism was a salutary reaction to the dogmatism of abolitionism. Such a view, as Lee Siegel has pointed out, works best if one believes that Americans did too much to free the slaves, and that African-Americans had no claim on their countrymen's conscience after 1876. Consider the way Menand dismisses the idea that Holmes had any kind of coherent politics, or his view that racism is simply an atavism due to dissolve in the course of modernization. "The evil of modern society isn't that it creates racism but that it creates conditions in which people who don't suffer from injustice seem incapable of caring very much about people who do." Read this again carefully. Is there nothing "modern" about racism? Is callousness a recent development? Menand has criticized in the past post-structuralists and Critical Legal Studies, but at least these people were not guilty of that sort of banality. On the plus side, the essay on T.S. Eliot's anti-semitism is quite useful, and includes the fact that Eliot compared the notorious anti-Semite Charles Maurras to Virgil in an article published after Maurras' conviction for collaboration with the Nazis. There are some useful comments about the New Yorker style, and some interesting comments on the development of the technology of television. Also, he likes Laurie Anderson.

Menand hones in on his subjects and nails them dead on. Whether it is T.S. Eliot's antisemitism, the middle-brow nature of the New Yorker, or the brain of Al Gore, Menand has a way of clearing away the clutter and offering lucid, witty assessments. What do Larry Flynt and the founder of the moral majority have in common? Read this book and find out.

A good selection of readings with all sorts different authors. Putnam, James, Rorty, Dewy and West--just to name a few. The selections are interesting and varied enough to give the beginner to pragmatism an interesting first or second taste. For those that are more familiar with pragmatism, this gives a selection of authors that one may not be familiar with (be they contemporaries like Putnam or one of the originators like Dewey). Pragmatism apart from being (arguably) "true" (and any pragmatist should understand the scare quotes) is also a whole lot of fun!! An anthology with variety and short-ish readings is doubly so. Also, the introduction I think, is to be commended. It's pretty good and would be worth reading apart from this collection.

This book is astounding! It manages to accomplish in around 500 pages the twin tasks of giving a functional outline of the rise and rise of pragmatic thought and also to give examples, old and new, of that same pragmatic thought. The three more well-known "founders" (popularisers) of this philosophical method slash attitude are here in C.S. Peirce, William James and John Dewey along with an interesting selection of more modern pragmatists, such as Richard Rorty (of course!), Cornel West and Hilary Putnam. One name that is missing from the contemporary selection is Stanley Fish, but since he seems to aim his sights indiscriminately he may be thought to be rather roguish for this sane and coherent selection of writings that the editor, Louis Menand, has pulled together.

In his introductory piece Menand charts Pragmatism's birth in the universities of north eastern America in the second half of the nineteenth century and points up some of its distinctives (of which there are very few and deliberately so). This piece is worth the price of the book itself for its clarity, insight and authority. The choices Menand makes in presenting the pragmatic thinkers will always be one of judgment and decision (Are the two writings he chooses from Richard Rorty's work, "Philosophy as a Kind of Writing" and "Postmodernist Bourgeois Liberalism" really more appropriate to this collection? I would choose others.) and we may quibble with one or two and suggest others but Menand has made his choices and given his rationale and we, as readers, can ask no more. What is served up is insightful and powerful (when taken together) as an example of pragmatic thoughts in practice and, as such, demonstrates the oft written thought of William James that Pragmatism "does not stand for any special results. It is a method only." James means that pragmatists don't have to agree to be pragmatic for being pragmatic is "trac[ing] out in the imagination the conceivable practical consequences.....of the affirmation or denial" (C.S. Peirce) of whatever belief, truth or proposal you have in mind. Thus, we realise that Pragmatism as a philosophy is at least contextual, subjective and case by case. As a reader in Pragmatism this book does a superb job of demonstrating this and Menand, as editor, is to be congratulated. Much recommended.

PoSTmodERnFoOL

I was tricked into reading this book due to it being a well known classic and from a desire to read a good romantic story which I thought it would be. Well, um, IT'S NOT.

I like to read books that draw me right into the story and then a couple of hours later you notice you are turning page 250 when the last you recall touching was page 97. This book was not like that at all. Unfortunately, I was always conscious that I was reading print from a page but kept reminding myself that a book this famous had to get good sooner or later. Far from not being able to put it down, I found myself often looking to see what page I was on and if I had read my quota for the night. It never did get good and when I had finished the last sentence I felt frustrated and cheated.

I worried that my lack of appreciation for this classic must be due to my inferior intellect and that I must after all be just some obtuse hill-billy. Thankfully I found that several people who had offered their reviews here shared my opinions for this book and I was quite relieved that I was not alone in my reaction.

For me, Lawrence's supremely descriptive, possibly brilliant (although I really wouldn't know) and flowery writing is all for not because of selfish, unlikeable and unbelieveable characters who don't really do anything. At the very end, the only care I had for anyone in the book was poor little Winifred. I hope she was alright.

In conclusion may I suggest that you pass on Women in Love and read instead Far From the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy. It is so much more a wonderful book about believable, likeable, women in love.

Women In Love written by D.H. Lawrence is not as explicit as his other novels, and instead of concentrating on sexual content, Lawrence chose to depict the relationships between two sisters and their boyfriends. D.H. Lawrence goes deep into the minds of human beings and reveals the real secrets of emotions, feelings, and thoughts that people usually hide inside. Statements such as "The Dead Should Bury the Dead" illustrate the content of living and dying, which the book frequently discusses. The book is difficult and long to read, but it opens up the reader's mind and forces the reader to reavaluate the content of his or her relationship with other people.

First of all, I have to own you up that reading Women in Love was one of the best experiences on books that I ever had. I know it's not Lawurence's masterpiece, but I touched me very deep. Everthing seems to wok in this book, from the characters to their enviroment.

It seems to me that Lawrence took daily events and showed them the way they are: unglamourised. He showed me what love and support seem to be. It's not about being happy all the time or that kind of love that happens only in movies. The book deals with the ordinary love, the one that normal human beings have the chance to face.

Following the experience of both couples made me see how different love can be and it is the still the same. I could perfectly understand all the worries and anxiets Gudrun had. And I think Gerald and she made quite a couple! Yet Birkin and Ursula look very nice together since the begin. Their love is not as 'wild' as the other couple's, but it is very strong indeed.

When the book was over I got down because I had to let them go. Following the lives of such people for a few days made quite an impression on me. Even though they may not be XXI century people like us, they have the same essence we do.

All in all, I know this review may read very emotive and personal, but this is a book that I couldn't apart in other to write about