A wonderful book. It did three things for me: (1) it provide a sizzling articulation of some of Nietzche's thought (which isn't so easy a task); (2) it brought clarity to the undergirdings of democracy, and exposed it's failings with Nietzche's lens; and (3) it jolted me--I'd doubt tacit, everyday assumptions about equality, etc. as I was walking down the street.

Like the battle for the body of Patroclus, conflicting interpretations of Nietzsche are strewn across the twentieth century, leaving few proofs of a triumph of the will. Between the irrationalism indicted by Lukacs and the vigorous liberal depicted by Kaufmann, we are still in search of Nietzsche. The work of Kaufmann,especially, was a critical first step to any reevaluation of this legacy. Yet its perspective fails to completely account for the record and the shadow behind the man, now too often exempted of the implications of his own savage eloquence. This work is a corrective and traces the whole history of the question from the 1890's onward, and resummons the grim stages of Nietzsche's appropriation by preposterous figures of all hues. From the not-so-discrete Nietzscheanism of the avant-garde to the Zarathustra in the trenches of World War I to the phantom of the opera during the Third Reich the horrific travesties seem too recurrent to release their author from all complicity, even as they leave the deeper Nietzsche intact. It is difficult not to swing between extremes of interpretation here, and the book carefully constructs the middle ground, as we pass on and say goodbye to all that.
The book details that several hundred thousand copies of Zarathustra were printed for distribution to the soldiers in the trenches during Great War. One can begin to deduce the rest from that.

What you will get in this set are: Birth of Tragedy, The Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, Human All too Human (I), Gay Science (book 5), Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, The Case of Wagner, Twilight of Idols, Ecce Homo, Dionysos-Dithyramben. All are in German. Though it doesn't exhaust the books by Nietzsche, not even does it cover all the major works ( Actually, I am a bit disappointed about not having The Geneology of Moral(s) in this set), I think it is still worthwhile. You can learn not only philosophy from Nietzsche but also his writing style (in german, of course). As it is well-known that Nietzsche wrote beautiful german which are mostly distorted or missed out after translated into other languages.

May could set a new standard in Nietzsche scholarship and writing. The book is quite lucid and clear, with numbered sections and subsections, and occasionally numbered paragraphs--like a work from Wittgenstein. The numbers facilitate recall and research as well as May's presentation.

The author holds, in short, that Nietzsche can only be at war with one strain of morality, not moral life per se, nor moral judgment, nor moral thought in toto. This is the strain that Nietzsche called 'the morality that would unself man.' It is variously said to be dacadence ethics, resentment ethics, ascetic morality, life-denying ethics and so on. May organizes the various remarks and sorts the kinds of ethics under discussion. He asks clear questions about the categories in question, and is anxious to point out that Nietzsche in no way rejects things ad hominem or via the genetic fallacy. He does not reject, say, a belief because it is born of envy, or resentment, or etc. His judgment is against only certain employments of resentment, and even against only certain functions life denial has come to fill. As such, May's Nietzsche practices a far more nuanced form of moral judgment than most authors have assigned him.

The final quarter of the work deals with the question of the value of truth, which is surely Nietzsche's most characteristic question. May's Nietzsche comes off as entirely resistant to postmodernist hubris over the surprisingly low value they assign to truth. Nietzsche assigns truth a very high value, especially for those who have responsibilities. Honesty, which Nietzsche calls the youngest of the virtues, is, of course, the characteristic modern cruelty, and a cruelty whose value Nietzsche promotes and whose presuppostion, truth, Nietzsche must also value.

May has done us all quite a favor by rendering certain contours of Nietzsche's moral thought so clearly. A must read for serious students.

For the reader who just needs a gentle boost to get atop the masks of Nietzsche, this book will enable you to appreciate sophistication that you may not have even known was there. Not coffee table material, but palpably attractive to the discerning mind.

If there is a common theme that ties together the essays in this book it is what might be termed as Nietzsche's "ironical aesthetics" (or "aesthetic irony," to state the flip). Essays are included by Tracy B. Strong, Michael Allen Gillespie, Sarah Kofman, and Hans-Georg Gadamer, among others. My favorite essay in the book is Sarah Kofman's "Baubo: Theological Perversion and Fetishism" (available nowhere else in English, as far as I know), which alone justifies the price of the book.

Lowith was a brilliant German-Jewish scholar whose work was published in Berlin at the onset of National Socialism. However, he could not teach due to the racial Laws of the regime. Lowith's book is clearly and beautifully written, and is a superb analysis of the centrality of the Eternal Recurrence and the Superman idea to Nietzsche studies. Highly recommended to advanced students of Nietzsche.

This is one of the most valuble guides to the study of Nietzsche's philosophy. Symbolism was at the heart of Nietzsche's project, and Jung is the master of symbolic interpretation. Anyone who is attempting to fully grasp Nietzsche's Zarathustra must consult this text. This edition includes an exceptional index, useful in a work of this size and scope.

Reaching a clear picture of the real Nietzsche is not easy, and this work shows one of the reasons: the systematic distortions of, not only the history, but of the actual corpus, of his work.
In a complex picture, we see, on the one hand, the controversial positions of Nietzsche on democracry, religion, and ethics, along with his criticism, at some points, of Judaic history, in relation to his extreme anti-Christianity. In the midst of all this, we also discover Nietzsche's sudden realization of what Wagner's racist and proto-fascist, anti-semitic clique of admirers were up to, and his shocked reaction and break with the circle. This initiates a long period of the denunciation of the rising anti-semitism of his times, next to his friendship with Ree. Then, after Nietzsche succumbs to his disease, and is silent, his corpus is appropriated by his sister, and the era of great distortions, and probable doctoring of his legacy and texts begins. As the author shows, the Nazis main interest in Nietzsche seems to have been to neutralize, and destroy, him by making him an anti-semite. The outstanding letters to Overbeck, the object of repeated lawsuits with Nietzsche's sister, but never surrendered, show clearly his anti-anti-semitism.
Cf also the recent, Nietzsche, Godfather of Fascism?, by Golomb et al. which critiques the 'myth' of Nietzsche's sister

The author of this book, Janko Lavrin, was a distinguished literary scholar who once taught at University College in Nottingham England. He is best known for his books on Russian writers, but also published three short studies of Nietzsche, one in 1922, another in 1948, and this one in the early 1970's. Some portions of the 1922 book, "Nietzsche and Modern Consciousness," and the 1948 book, "Nietzsche: An Approach" reappear, with slight modifications, in this book.

The British philosopher Michael Oakeshott wrote a very favorable review of "Nietzsche: An Approach" when it was published, describing it as the best study of Nietzsche that had then been written. I think "Nietzsche: A Biographical Introduction" is even better than the earlier book. Written in a very lucid and graceful prose style, the book elucidates the most important themes of Nietzsche's work, and relates these to his physical infirmities, which worsened as he grew older, and to the psychological compensations he made for his illnesses. In addition, Lavrin shows how Nietzsche's intellectual and emotional crisis was emblematic of the profound crisis European civilization was confronted with in the late nineteenth century.

The portrait of Nietzsche that emerges from Lavrin's book is that of a tormented genius who was absolutely committed to finding meaning in a godless universe, but who would never settle for the comforting illusions invented by the "herd" to provide that meaning. While Lavrin concludes that some of Nietzsche's solutions were ultimately lacking, he provides a moving account of the stupendous effort Nietzsche made -- and the personal and psychological burdens he endured -- in order to grapple honestly with questions that we are still struggling to answer today. If you have an interest in understanding Nietzsche as a man, and not just as a purveyor of provocative ideas, I urge you to read this superb book.