Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

James Miller has some writing talent -- he turns the lives of eight philosophers into a fairly entertaining scan. Along the way, he doesn't get much of the philosophy right, a few hours in a library with the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy (10 Volume Set) would have been time well spent for him (and if you care about the philosophy, probably for you as well.) He also paints a fairly cartoonish picture of all of his subjects. Having just read Sarah Bakewell's outstanding How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer, I found Miller's treatment of the 16th century French sage embarrassing. All of this could have been forgiven if Miller had, either within the text or in an afterward, tied the mini-biographies together with some valuable insights about philosophy. Richard Ben Cramer's classic 1988 Presidential campaign opus What It Takes: The Way to the White House might have been a valuable template for such an effort. Unfortunately, Warren presents the stories in a linear fashion and makes no effort to draw connections between the philosophers in the main text, leaving the impression that he's going to get to the point of it all in his afterward. But his afterward is repugnant -- giving right-wing preacher Rick Warren basically the last word on the utility of philosophy. Miller keeps reminding his readers that he is a historian, but his approach is deeply ahistorical -- detached from his subjects, observing them purely from a contemporary perspective with little appreciation for the way these men of thought were products of their times. And while Miller seems to agree with Rick Warren that philosophy is a complete waste of time, one has to wonder why read this book at all, unless one wants to gain a highly cursory knowledge of philosophy and license to never read or discuss it again.