Title: Entertaining, but poor science
Product review: I enjoyed his history of 1815 - 1830 very much, so I bought this without much thought, assuming it would show the genesis of certain ideas.It contains highly critical biographies of some people - Tolstoy, Hemmingway, Sartre, Brecht, and others, and says little about their ideas.Assuming that they were such bums as described, what point is proven?Where is a solid definition of what is meant by 'intellectual'? Where is a long list of those who fit and those who don't and why?How is it shown that the samples chosen for detailed study are randomly selected?And even if all this be true, once the unproven is discarded, all it says is that some people with very stong convictions tend to let those convictions blind them to truth and to common humanity. Rather tautological.Entertaining, but poor science.
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