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\"The first complete account of the ideas and writings of a major figure in twentieth-century intellectual life. Walter Kaufmann (1921-1980) was a charismatic philosopher, critic, translator, and poet who fled Nazi Germany at the age of eighteen, emigrating alone to the United States. He was astonishingly prolific until his untimely death at age fifty-nine, writing some dozen major books, all marked by breathtaking erudition and a provocative essayistic style. He single-handedly rehabilitated Nietzsche's reputation after World War II and was enormously influential in introducing postwar American readers to existentialism. Until now, no book has examined his intellectual legacy. Stanley Corngold provides the first in-depth study of Kaufmann's thought, covering all his major works. He shows how Kaufmann speaks to many issues that concern us today, such as the good of philosophy, the effects of religion, the persistence of tragedy, and the crisis of the humanities in an age of technology. Few scholars in modern times can match Kaufmann's range of interests, from philosophy and literature to intellectual history and comparative religion, from psychology and photography to art and architecture. Corngold provides a heartfelt portrait of a man who, to an extraordinary extent, transfigured his personal experience in the pages of his books.This original study, both appreciative and critical, is the definitive intellectual life of one of the twentieth century's most engaging yet neglected thinkers. It will introduce Kaufmann to a new generation of readers and serves as a fitting tribute to a scholar's incomparable libido sciendi, or lust for knowledge.\"-- Provided by publisher.

In the tradition of My Car in Managua, this is a wise and captivating memoir of a young leftist radical’s transformation while spending ten months as a Sandinista revolutionary in the early 1980s, and his struggle to reconcile uncomfortable truths with his ideals of justice.

“The tragedy of the left is that, having achieved an unprecedented victory in helping stop an appalling war, it then proceeded to commit suicide.” So writes Todd Gitlin about the aftermath of the Vietnam War in this collection of writings that calls upon intellectuals on the left to once again engage American public life and resist the trappings of knee-jerk negativism, intellectual fads, and political orthodoxy. Gitlin argues for a renewed sense of patriotism based on the ideals of sacrifice, tough-minded criticism, and a willingness to look anew at the global role of the United States in the aftermath of 9/11. Merely criticizing and resisting the Bush administration will not do—the left must also imagine and propose an America reformed. Where then can the left turn? Gitlin celebrates the work of three prominent postwar intellectuals: David Riesman, C. Wright Mills, and Irving Howe. Their ambitious, assertive, and clearly written works serve as models for an intellectual engagement that forcefully addresses social issues and remains affirmative and comprehensive. Sharing many of the qualities of these thinkers’ works, Todd Gitlin’s blunt, frank analysis of the current state of the left and his willingness to challenge orthodoxies pave the way for a revival in leftist thought and a new liberal patriotism.

The profound economic and social changes in the post-Civil War United States created new challenges to a nation founded on Enlightenment and transcendental values, religious certainties, and rural traditions. Newly-freed African Americans, emboldened women, intellectuals and artists, and a polyglot tide of immigrants found themselves in a restless new world of railroads, factories, and skyscrapers where old assumptions were being challenged and new values had yet to be created. In An American Cakewalk: Ten Syncopators of the Modern World, Zeese Papanikolas tells the lively and entertaining story of a diverse group of figures in the arts and sciences who inhabited this new America. Just as ragtime composers subverted musical expectations by combining European march timing with African syncopation, so this book's protagonists—who range from Emily Dickinson to Thorstein Veblen and from Henry and William James to Charles Mingus—interrogated the modern American world through their own \"syncopations\" of cultural givens. The old antebellum slave dance, the cakewalk, with its parody of the manners and pretensions of the white folks in the Big House, provides a template of how the tricksters, shamans, poets, philosophers, ragtime pianists, and jazz musicians who inhabit this book used the arts of parody, satire, and disguise to subvert American cultural norms and to create new works of astonishing beauty and intellectual vigor.

A longtime agitator against war and social injustice, Lawrence Wittner has been tear-gassed, threatened by police with drawn guns, charged by soldiers with fixed bayonets, spied upon by the U.S. government, arrested, and purged from his job for political -reasons. To say that this teacher-historian-activist has led an interesting life is a considerable understatement. In this absorbing memoir, Wittner traces the dramatic course of a life and career that took him from a Brooklyn boyhood in the 1940s and ’50s to an education at Columbia University and the University of Wisconsin to the front lines of peace activism, the fight for racial equality, and the struggles of the labor movement. He details his family background, which included the bloody anti-Semitic pogroms of late-nineteenth-century Eastern Europe, and chronicles his long teaching career, which comprised positions at a small black college in Virginia, an elite women’s liberal arts college north of New York City, and finally a permanent home at the Albany campus of the State University of New York. Throughout, he packs the narrative with colorful vignettes describing such activities as fighting racism in Louisiana and Mississippi during the early 1960s, collaborating with peace-oriented intellectuals in Gorbachev’s Soviet Union, and leading thousands of antinuclear demonstrators through the streets of Hiroshima. As the book also reveals, Wittner’s work as an activist was matched by scholarly achievements that made him one of the world’s foremost authorities on the history of the peace and nuclear disarmament movements—a research specialty that led to revealing encounters with such diverse figures as Norman Thomas, the Unabomber, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Caspar Weinberger, and David Horowitz. A tenured professor and renowned author who has nevertheless lived in tension with the broader currents of his society, Lawrence Wittner tells an engaging personal story that includes some of the most turbulent and significant events of recent history. Lawrence S. Wittner, emeritus professor of history at the University at Albany, SUNY, is the author of numerous scholarly works, including the award-winning three-volume Struggle Against the Bomb . Among other awards and honors, he has received major grants or fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Aspen Institute, the United States Institute of Peace, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

This insightful critical biography shows us an Edward Said we did not know. H. Aram Veeser brings forth not the Said of tabloid culture, or Said the remote philosopher, but the actual man, embedded in the politics of the Middle East but soaked in the values of the West and struggling to advance the best European ideas. Veeser shows the organic ties connecting his life, politics, and criticism. Drawing on what he learned over 35 years as Said's student and skeptical admirer, Veeser uses never-before-published interviews, debate transcripts, and photographs to discover a Said who had few inhibitions and loathed conventional routine. He stood for originality, loved unique ideas, wore marvelous clothes, and fought with molten fury. For twenty years he embraced and rejected, at the same time, not only the West, but also literary theory and the PLO. At last, his disgust with business-as-usual politics and criticism marooned him on the sidelines of both. The candid tale of Said's rise from elite academic precincts to the world stage transforms not only our understanding of Said—the man and the myth—but also our perception of how intellectuals can make their way in the world. \"This is a brave book, written with gusto—a student from Edward Said’s early days at Columbia cuts through the myth and puts together the ‘real maestro,’ with respect, sympathy and meticulous attention to detail.\"— Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak , Columbia University \"The most engaging study of Edward Said now available, this book traces Said’s progress from highbrow denizen of the Ivy Leagues to a gritty intellectual on the world stage. It also gives an inside portrait of Said, from a one-time student who knew him for thirty-five years, depicting Said’s habits of mind, charisma, and contradictions. With a seemingly encyclopedic grasp of Said’s work, Veeser also writes with panache, offering his own example of creative criticism .\"— Jeffrey J. Williams, Co-editor of The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism \"At last, a critic has come along with the cunning, candor, and brilliance to pluck out the heart of the mystery of Edward Said. A mesmerizing read—and unlikely to be surpassed .\"— James Shapiro, Columbia University 　 \"The late Edward Said is often pictured as a passionate fighter for radical causes. But in this provocative and eminently readable book, H. Aram Veeser reveals a Said who was far more divided than anyone thought.\"— Gerald Graff , author of Clueless in Academe 　 \"Part biography, part memoir, part analysis and even part critique, Veeser's book is a fitting medium for addressing the life and work of a man whose achievements and aspirations far exceeded what could be contained in any one category or even series of categories. No one who knew Said will doubt the attribution of charisma—and those who didn't will get a good sense of it from this book. \"— David Simpson, University of California, Davis \"Veeser has written an absolutely splendid hybrid of a book: part intellectual biography, part personal reminiscence, part homage, and part scholarly critique. As insouciant in its observations as Edward Said was in his person, Veeser’s book treats Said’s Princetonian polish as a central element of his thought and not simply as elegant haberdashery. Said’s outsized scholarly ambition and rhetorical cleverness are more than matched in Veeser’s pithy account by his unpredictability and penchant for self-contradiction, all of them hallmarks of the charismatic hero who refuses to play by the rules that govern common mortals. We desperately need just this sort of informed, critical, and yet balanced approach to our intellectual stars, rather than the hagiography so often demanded and supplied. Said, oppositional critic to the bitter end, deserves no less.\" —Vincent P. Pecora, University of Utah \"… Vesser (City College of New York) has written a beautifully crafted examination of the legacy of the renowned Palestinian literary critic, who died in 2003.\" – B. A. McGowan, Moraine Valley Community College (CHOICE Feb. 2011) Introduction Chapter I: The Charisma of Edward Said Chapter 2: Beginning Again Chapter 3: Emergence Chapter 4: Academostardom Chapter 5: Secular Criticism Chapter 6: Rhetoric and Image Chapter 7: On Stage Chapter 8: Later Visions Chapter 9: Marquee Intellectual Chapter 10: Political Roughhouse Chapter 11: Dropping the PLO Chapter 12: Said in History H. Aram Veeser is Associate Professor at The City College of New York. He is coauthor of Painting Between the Lines (2001), and editor of The New Historicism (1989), The New Historicism Reader (1994), Confessions of the Critics (1996), and The Stanley Fish Reader (1999). Besides his work as a writer and critic, Veeser pursues outside interests that range from drawing and painting to motorcycling and competitive rowing.