title: Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius
author:  Leopold Damrosch 
description: Considering Rousseau's prominence and historical importance, it is surprising to discover that (according to the publisher) this is the first single-volume biography in English. Damrosch, a professor of literature at Harvard University, has succeeded in presenting an incisive, accessible and sensitive portrait of this unpleasant, infuriating "restless genius."Sometimes, indeed, perhaps a little too sensitive: Damrosch's admiration can prevent his strongly condemning where condemnation is due. Rousseau (17121778) was the man, we should recall, who consigned his own infants to a foundling home, who sent a miserably small sum of money to his ailing former patroness and who bought an adolescent girl for nefarious purposes. Where Damrosch truly excels is in not only masterfully explaining the originality and meaning of <i>mile</i>, <i>The Social Contract</i> and the <i>Confessions</i>, but in relating those works to their author's conflicted, contradictory psyche. As Rousseau himself admitted, "I would rather be a man of paradoxes than a man of prejudices."Also, in vividly delineating the sage's final decade for the first time, Damrosch has performed a signal service: Maurice Cranston, who was writing a three-volume biography, died before completing the last partthereby leaving readers in the dark as to Rousseau's fate. No longer. 43 b&amp;w illus. <br />Copyright  Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
zlib_text: BELVEDERE TIBURON LIBRARY 
  02280 0179 
  
  $30.00 
  The extraordinary life of lean-Jacques Rousseau, 
  the eighteenth-century literary genius 
  who changed the course of history, 
  traced with novelistic verve 
  fig 
  OTHERLESS CHILD, FAILED APPRENTICE, 
  autodidact, impossibly odd lover, Jean- 
  L ▼ A Jacques Rousseau burst unexpectedly 
  onto the eighteenth-century scene as a literary 
  provocateur whose works electrified readers from 
  the start. Rousseau’s impact on American social 
  and political thought remains deep, wide, and, to 
  some, even infuriating. 
  Leo Damrosch beautifully mines Rousseau’s 
  books — The Social Contract, one of the greatest 
  works on political theory and a direct influence on 
  the French and American revolutions; Emile, a 
  groundbreaking treatise on education; and the 
  Confessions, which created the genre of introspec¬ 
  tive autobiography — as works still uncannily 
  alive and provocative to us today. 
  Damrosch’s triumph is to integrate the story 
  of Rousseau’s extraordina