Hardly a club in the conventional sense, the organization referred to in the title of this superb literary hybrid—part history, part biography, part philosophy—consisted of four members and probably existed for less than nine months. Yet its impact upon American intellectual life remains incalculable. Louis Menand masterfully weaves pivotal late 19th-and early 20th-century events, colorful biographical anecdotes, and abstract ideas into a narrative whole that both entralls and enlightens.
The Metaphysical Club is a compellingly vital account of how the cluster of ideas that came to be called pragmatism was forged from the searing experiences of its progenitors' lives. Here are Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey, all of them giants of American thought made colloquially accessible both as human beings and as intellects.
The subject of this work is American intellectual history from 1880 through the early 1900s, viewed through the works and relationships of William James; John Dewey; Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.; and Charles Sanders Peirce. This abridgment gives a worthwhile perspective of American history and the development of legal and philosophical ideas that would shape America's future. Much of the content of this book is dense and intellectual--not a good choice for casual listening. The themes of the book are not well focused, and this quality accentuates the impression that narrator Henry Leyva is reading lines without understanding what he's saying. S.E.S. (c) AudioFile 2002, Portland, Maine
About the Author
LOUIS MENAND is a professor of English at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and also has taught at Princeton, Columbia, and the University of Virginia School of Law. A staff writer at The New Yorker, he has been a contributing editor of The New York Review of Books since 1994. He lives in New York City.
