Various comments/blurbs on these works:
The Metaphysical Club
The Civil War made America a modern nation, unleashing forces of industrialism and expansion that had been kept in check for decades by the quarrel over slavery. But the war also discredited the ideas and beliefs of the era that preceded it. The Civil War swept away the slave civilization of the South, but almost the whole intellectual culture of the North went with it. It took nearly half a century for Americans to develop a set of ideas, a way of thinking, that would help them cope with the conditions of modern life. That struggle is the subject of this book.
The story told in The Metaphysical Club runs through the lives of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., a Civil War hero who became the dominant legal thinker of his time; his best friend as a young man, William James, son of an eccentric moral philosopher, brother of a great novelist, and the father of modern psychology in America; and the brilliant and troubled logician, scientist, and founder of semiotics, Charles Sanders Peirce. Together they belonged to an informal discussion group that met in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1872 and called itself the Metaphysical Club. The club was probably in existence for only nine months, and no records were kept. The one thing we know that came out of it was an idea -- an idea about ideas, about the role beliefs play in people's lives. This idea informs the writings of these three thinkers, and the work of the fourth figure in the book, John Dewey -- student of Peirce, friend and ally of James, admirer of Holmes.
The Metaphysical Club begins with the Civil War and ends in 1919 with the Supreme Court decision in U.S. v. Abrams, the basis for the modern law of free speech. It tells the story of the creation of ideas and values that changed the way Americans think and the way they live.
"Hugely ambitious, unmistakably brilliant."
--Janet Maslin, The New York Times
Louis Menand’s sweeping narrative of how American intellectual life was transformed by the Civil War is "something very like a history of the American mind at work" (Alan Ryan, The New York Review of Books).
"[A] detailed and fascinating essay on the history of American intellectual life . . . Anybody interested in modern America will find rewards aplenty in The Metaphysical Club. It enlivens virtually everything it touches, and on its frequent diversions it touches many things."
--The Economist
"The Metaphysical Club shows how four exceptionally creative lives were entangled with each other and with each other’s specific reactions to abolitionism, war, capitalism, Kant, Hegel, Darwin and God . . . Menand puts it all together. If you can read only one book about pragmatism and American culture, this is the book to read."
--David A. Hollinger, American Scientist
"Brilliant . . . Menand brings rare common sense and graceful, witty prose to his richly nuanced reading of American intellectual history . . . Even [Oliver Wendell] Holmes might enjoy seeing their ideas so carefully and imaginatively explored."
--Jean Strouse, The New York Times Book Review
"Menand writes with the vividness and dash of a novelist; he has a clarity and energy of mind all his own. The result is not just first-rate intellectual history but a true adventure in ideas, and no one since Whitehead has written so splendid a story of ideas. Menand's story is how the modern American mind came into existence. It is original, utterly compelling, impossible to put down."
--Robert D. Richardson, Jr., author of Emerson: The Mind on Fire
"Louis Menand's The Metaphysical Club is brilliant, illuminating, necessary."
--Joan Didion
"There is no more elegant writer of American prose than Louis Menand. The Metaphysical Club makes a genuinely original contribution to our national self-understanding. It is as evocative, and precise, as a Luminist painting."
--Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
"The Metaphysical Club is a brilliant reanimation of American pragmatism as it evolved from the writings of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, and John Dewey and as it was shaped by the traumas of the Civil War and the immense social and economic changes that followed it. Menand has written the most nuanced account I've ever read of pragmatist thinking and he demonstrates, as no one so effectively has before, how public enterprise shaped its specifically American texture and tone. This is a richly populated, intellectually thrilling book in which America is shown to be discovering its future."
--Richard Poirier
"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. Menand's book is an extraordinary collective biography, at once erudite and enthralling."
--Daniel Kevles, Yale University
Middlesex.
A dazzling triumph from the bestselling author of The Virgin Suicides -- the astonishing tale of a gene that passes down through three generations of a Greek-American family and flowers in the body of a teenage girl.
In the spring of 1974, Calliope Stephanides, a student at a girls' school in Grosse Pointe, finds herself drawn to a chain-smoking, strawberry blond classmate with a gift for acting. The passion that furtively develops between them -- along with Callie's failure to develop -- leads Callie to suspect that she is not like other girls. In fact, she is not really a girl at all.
The explanation for this shocking state of affairs takes us out of suburbia -- back before the Detroit race riots of 1967, before the rise of the Motor City and Prohibition, to 1922, when the Turks sacked Smyrna and Callie's grandparents fled for their lives. Back to a tiny village in Asia Minor where two lovers, and one rare genetic mutation, set in motion the metamorphosis that will turn Callie into a being both mythical and perfectly real: a hermaphrodite.
Spanning eight decades -- and one unusually awkward adolescence -- Jeffrey Eugenides's long-awaited second novel is a grand, utterly original fable of crossed bloodlines, the intricacies of gender, and the deep, untidy promptings of desire. It marks the fulfillment of a huge talent, named one of America's best young novelists by both Granta and The New Yorker.
"Middlesex vibrates with wit, and shapes its outrageous premise into a beguiling panorama of the century in which America itself struggled to come to terms with its motley heritage and patchwork character . . ."
--Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
". . . Once again, Eugenides proves that he is not only a unique voice in modern literature but also well versed in the nature of the human heart."
--Library Journal (starred review)
" . . . Middlesex is a weird, wonderful novel that will sweep you off your feet."
--Jonathan Franzen
Time, Love, Memory
"A fascinating history--. Literate and authoritative--.Marvelously exciting." --The New York Times Book Review
Jonathan Weiner, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for The Beak of the Finch, brings his brilliant reporting skills to the story of Seymour Benzer, the Brooklyn-born maverick scientist whose study of genetics and experiments with fruit fly genes has helped revolutionize or knowledge of the connections between DNA and behavior both animal and human.
How much of our fate is decided before we are born? Which of our characteristics is inscribed in our DNA? Weiner brings us into Benzer's Fly Rooms at the California Institute of Technology, where Benzer, and his asssociates are in the process of finding answers, often astonishing ones, to these questions. Part biography, part thrilling scientific detective story, Time, Love, Memory forcefully demonstrates how Benzer's studies are changing our world view--and even our lives.