Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

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Benjamin Franklin, writes journalist and biographer Walter Isaacson, was that rare Founding Father who would sooner wink at a passer-by than sit still for a formal portrait. What's more, Isaacson relates in this fluent and entertaining biography, the revolutionary leader represents a political tradition that has been all but forgotten today, one that prizes pragmatism over moralism, religious tolerance over fundamentalist rigidity, and social mobility over class privilege. That broadly democratic sensibility allowed Franklin his contradictions, as Isaacson shows. Though a man of lofty principles, Franklin wasn't shy of using sex to sell the newspapers he edited and published; though far from frivolous, he liked his toys and his mortal pleasures; and though he sometimes gave off a simpleton image, he was a shrewd and even crafty politician. Isaacson doesn't shy from enumerating Franklin's occasional peccadilloes and shortcomings, in keeping with the iconoclastic nature of our time--none of which, however, stops him from considering Benjamin Franklin "the most accomplished American of his age," and one of the most admirable of any era. And here's one bit of proof: as a young man, Ben Franklin regularly went without food in order to buy books. His example, as always, is a good one--and this is just the book to buy with the proceeds from the grocery budget. --Gregory McNamee

Book Description

Benjamin Franklin is the founding father who winks at us, the one who seems made of flesh rather than marble. In this authoritative and engrossing full-scale biography, Walter Isaacson shows how the most fascinating of America's founders helped define our national character.

In a sweeping narrative that follows Franklin's life from Boston to Philadelphia to London and Paris and back, Isaacson chronicles the adventures of the spunky runaway apprentice who became, during his 84-year life, America's best writer, inventor, media baron, scientist, diplomat, and business strategist, as well as one of its most practical and ingenious political leaders. He explores the wit behind Poor Richard's Almanac and the wisdom behind the Declaration of Independence, the new nation's alliance with France, the treaty that ended the Revolution, and the compromises that created a near-perfect Constitution.

Above all, Isaacson shows how Franklin's unwavering faith in the wisdom of the common citizen and his instinctive appreciation for the possibilities of democracy helped to forge an American national identity based on the virtues and values of its middle class.

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"Benjamin Franklin is the Founding Father who winks at us. An ambitious urban entrepreneur who rose up the social ladder, from leather-aproned shopkeeper to dining with kings, he seems made of flesh rather than of marble. In bestselling author Walter Isaacson's vivid and witty full-scale biography, we discover why Franklin seems to turn to us from history's stage with eyes that twinkle from behind his new-fangled spectacles. By bringing Franklin to life, Isaacson shows how he helped to define both his own time and ours. He was, during his 84-year life, America's best scientist, inventor, diplomat, writer, and business strategist, and he was also one of its most practical -- though not most profound -- political thinkers. He was the only man who shaped all the founding documents of America: the Albany Plan of Union, the Declaration of Independence, the treaty of alliance with France, the peace treaty with England, and the Constitution. And he helped invent America's unique style of homespun humor, democratic values, and philosophical pragmatism. But the most interesting thing that Franklin invented, and continually reinvented, was himself. America's first great publicist, he was, in his life and in his writings, consciously trying to create a new American archetype. In the process, he carefully crafted his own persona, portrayed it in public, and polished it for posterity. In this colorful and intimate narrative, Isaacson provides the full sweep of Franklin's amazing life, from his days as a runaway printer to his triumphs as a statesman, scientist, and Founding Father. He chronicles Franklin's tumultuous relationship with his illegitimate son and grandson, his practical marriage, and his flirtations with the ladies of Paris. He also shows how Franklin helped to create the American character and why he has a particular resonance in the twenty-first century. "

Customer Reviews:

Underwhelming.......2007-10-10

This biography had its moments, but Isaacson was far too enamored of Franklin, and did not present a balanced view. He was overly critical of Adams, but failed to be objectively critical of Franklin (or the other Founding Fathers) in return. Franklin is the Founding Father I'd most like to meet, but this biography is far too flattering, and really, rather dull. Isaacson is a serviceable writer, but does not make the story really come alive.

Franklin was ahead of his time.......2007-10-03

Many of the reviews already give the praise to this book that I would give. As I kept reading I found it amazing that this man was actually born 300 years ago. Many of his views are still so relevant today. I kept finding myself saying, "Yes, I totally agree with Franklin's opinion on that." I can imagine Franklin living in 2007 and being fascinated with things like the Internet and communication. However, I bet he would be the type of person who would still find time to write a letter and sit back and relax with some friends and tea which we so often fail to do today. Great book!

Great Book!.......2007-09-15

This bio was thoroughly enjoyable. I expected it to be informative and educational, but what I didn't expect was to be entertained. Franklin was a very complex man, both deep and shallow. He had very shallow relationships with his family, mainly his wife and son, very flirtaceous with other women, while being a deep thinker, an entrepreneur, American statesman, diplomat and genius. There's a lot of American history in the book with out being slow and boring.

I simply loved this book.

Thoroughly enjoyable........2007-09-13

I read elsewhere that Franklin was about 70 years of age before going to France as Embassador. He was quick witted to be sure but a bit unpredictable for his French caretakers. He left nothing for them in his will. Isaacson did a wonderful job of reporting on Frankin's irascible character.

Entertaining and Enlightening.......2007-08-29

Walter Issacson is a very meticulous and loquacious writer. I found myself looking for the dictionary while trying to decipher the meaning of his writing. The book is very verbose, very detailed, and gives an accurate and balanced view into Franklin's personal and political life.

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Of Benjamin, Dwarfs and Angels
Clarity and Brilliance
Just a quick note
Brilliance
Indispensable reading

Illuminations: Essays and Reflections
Walter Benjamin
Manufacturer: Schocken
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0805202412
Release Date: 1969-01-13

Book Description

Walter Benjamin was one of the most original cultural critics of the twentieth century. Illuminations includes his views on Kafka, with whom he felt a close personal affinity; his studies on Baudelaire and Proust; and his essays on Leskov and on Brecht's Epic Theater. Also included are his penetrating study "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," an enlightening discussion of translation as a literary mode, and Benjamin's theses on the philosophy of history.

Hannah Arendt selected the essays for this volume and introduces them with a classic essay about Benjamin's life in dark times. Also included is a new preface by Leon Wieseltier that explores Benjamin's continued relevance for our times.

Customer Reviews:

Of Benjamin, Dwarfs and Angels.......2006-08-28

The depth of Benjamin's pessimism has, I think, been underestimated.

"The story is told of an automation constructed in such a way that it could play a winning game of chess, answering each move of an opponent with a countermove. A puppet in Turkish attire and with a hookah in its mouth sat before a chessboard placed on a large table. A system of mirrors created the illusion that this table was transparent from all sides. Actually, a little hunchback who was an expert chess player sat inside and guided the puppet's hand by means of strings. One can imagine a philosophical counterpart to this device. The puppet called "historical materialism" is to win all the time. It can easily be a match for anyone if it enlists the services of theology, which today, as we know, is wizened and has to keep out of sight." Walter Benjamin, First "These on the Philosophy of History", p 253.

One can measure how far the contemporary Marxist (better said, the post or semi-Marxist) left has fallen by how many books have appeared, since the fall of the USSR, enthusing over the radically Universal and allegedly 'Progressive' nature of early Christianity. Walter Benjamin, who was first to place the wise but ugly dwarf (Theology) in the beautiful puppet (Historical Materialism) would be amazed (or perhaps not, see the letters between Benjamin and Scholem) to learn that puppet and dwarf are on the verge of switching places! That is, now the ugly dwarf (historical materialism) wants to hide in (and of course direct) the beautiful puppet of Christian theology. ...Crazy, you say? But even Habermas, the Keeper of the Flame of Critical Theory, has on occasion made somewhat similar noises. The best place, btw, to start reading about this new 'political-theology' probably remains Jacob Taubes.

But perhaps this emergent trend is really not so crazy after all. The only reason the Church became so cozy with Capitalism was its fear of Atheism. The collapse of the Soviet Union ended that fear. Now Christianity faces Capitalism alone. Or not, if the detente being proposed between the left and the Church is actually consummated. But every detente is a conspiracy of enemies to destroy an even greater enemy. The Church was with Capitalism because it had to defeat atheism. Now it is likely that the Church will join (a moderate) Socialism in trying to contain the 'soul-destroying' ravages of capitalism. This is only another move on the chessboard of History. ...But what did Benjamin think of History?

"A Klee painting named "Angelus Novus" shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress." BENJAMIN, Ninth Thesis on History, p 257.

Picture this Angel, wings pinned back by the wind, shoulders forced back because of that - the Angel of History is almost in the position of the Crucified Christ; except that this crucification does not end. It is this tone of almost ontological despair that was new to the left. This Crucified Angel is the perfect image of the left-wing theoretical pessimism pioneered by not only Benjamin but also Adorno and Horkheimer that split the intellectual left into two camps: the revolutionary and the cultural. And though no one is likely to admit it, the cultural left has quietly come to think of revolution itself as but another 'progressive' force piling up bodies.

It is one of the little ironies of history that this despairing fantasy described contemporary reality exactly. The Angel of History is the image of dialectical knowledge. Rather than seeing disconnected events this Dialectical Knowledge grasps History as One (single catastrophe). Always facing the past ('the owl of Minerva takes flight at night', Hegel said; meaning that dialectical knowledge is retrospective) the 'contemplating' Angel is overwhelmed by historical action - the storm that has been blowing since the expulsion of humanity from paradise - and can never Himself achieve effective action. His knowledge grows in lockstep with the accumulating horror, but each new historical event only results (i,e., gets 'caught in the wings' of our Angel) in more contemplation. So we see how theory (our Angel) is 'irresistibly' propelled into the future. And we also see that the Knowledge dialectical theory gains is precisely equal to the debris the storm hurls at our Angel's feet. With an irony that strives to be equal to the wind blowing from Paradise Benjamin ends this meditation by calling this storm progress.

This is perhaps why Benjamin insisted over 50 years ago that the dwarf Theology must guide the puppet Historical Materialism. Theory can never be equal to action; circumstance piles upon circumstance so rapidly that theory cannot effectively act, and if it does act (presumably) it only adds to the debris. Thus theology (myth) must guide materialism's hand because theoretical knowledge is powerless to help. Benjamin quotes the following remarks of Willy Haas, with approval, in his large Kafka essay;

"'The object of the trial', he writes, 'indeed, the real hero of this incredible book is forgetting, whose main characteristic is the forgetting of itself [...] The most sacred ... act of the ... ritual is the erasing of sins from the book of memory.'
What has been forgotten - and this insight affords us yet another avenue of access to Kafka's work - is never something purely individual." (Benjamin, Franz Kafka, p 131.)

(The last sentence was Benjamin's own.) Theology is a non-individual forgetfulness. Thus myth (theology) is the only forgetfulness worthy of the name. What needs to be forgotten by all of us is the unsurpassable fact of the futility of theory...

It is difficult for most to look such despair in the face.

Clarity and Brilliance.......2006-04-17

In 1940 Walter Benjamin committed suicide at the Franco-Spanish border fearing that he would be unable to escape the grasp of Hitler's regime. He left behind perhaps one of the finest collections of literary theory of his era, complete with lucidly brilliant essays on Kafka, Proust, Baudelaire, and general Marxist theory.

In this wholly excellent collection of essays, a remarkable introduction to Benjamin's life and work is provided by the late philosopher Hannah Arendt, who overviews his political formations and literary output. It's a model form of critical essay writing.

Perhaps the most famous essay in this collection is Benjamin's `The Task of the Translator,' widely regarded as one of the most important and thoughtful contributions to the field.

"No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no sympathy for the listener."

He argues that translation is a mode, and that the translatability of the work is the primary concern in the process.

Also included is an analysis of the philosophy of history.

Just a quick note.......2005-07-01

I have nothing to add to the reviews below except to note for scholarly interest that the essay 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction' included in this collection is not Benjamin's final version. (Neither is this title a good translation of the German: 'Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit'. Zohn's translation in the selected writings is better: 'The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility'.) The text in this collection is the 1935 manuscript, as originally published in 1936; the text collected in the Selected Writings, Vol. 3 is the final 1936 version that, as far as I can tell, was not published in Benjamin's lifetime. The difference between the two texts is slight, consisting mainly of some additional sentences here and there and some changed words. At least one of these revisions is, I hypothesize, the result of Adorno's criticisms of his letter to Benjamin of 18 Mar 1936.

Otherwise, for most purposes, this is the best collection of Benjamin's essays available for an introduction to his thought. This volume collects some of the best of his essays that are otherwise spread throughout the selected writings published by the Harvard U.P.

Brilliance.......2005-05-12

I picked up this book primarily for the purpose of reading Benjamin's critically acclaimed essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction", as well as for his darkly poetic - and even apocalyptic - "Theses on the Philosophy of History". These essays are among Benjamin's most highly esteemed and are the last two selections in the book; regardless of whether you start with them or with the first essay, "Unpacking My Library: A Talk about Book Collecting", you are likely to be drawn into Benjamin's literary world quite quickly.

In many ways, Benjamin's writing style is quite unassuming; reading even his most profound insights is like reading a letter from an old friend. His writing comes in layers; one must make time to savor his presence. This book covers a range of subjects, from critical literary essays (the aforementioned "Unpacking My Library", as well as essays on Kafka, Baudelaire and Proust), to more hermeneutical reflections ("The Task of the Translator"), to straight up philosophy/theory ("The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" and "Theses on the Philosophy of History").

The 51 page introduction by Hannah Arendt is absolutely fantastic. It does not simply provide an overview of Benjamin's life, but sets that life within the culture of early 20th century Germany, focusing especially on the time between the two World Wars. She notes the influences of Zionism and Communism (and Marxism) on Benjamin's thought, as well as the broader cultural influence of a quasi-secularized Judaism in a culture where non-baptized Jews were still kept out of university teaching posts. Her introduction, like Benjamin's own writing, contains deep touches of the intimately personal (she selected the various essays that make up this volume).

In many ways, Benjamin was a deeply religious thinker. A friend of Gershom Scholem's (the founder of the modern-day study of Jewish mysticism), Benjamin and Scholem corresponded for a number of years. Although this particular volume pays little attention to his religious thought, "Theses on the Philosophy of History" (the final selection in the book which, in light of Benjamin's suicide, gives Illuminations a bit of a haunting finale), witnesses to Benjamin's poetic-religious insights:

"The soothsayers who found out from time what it had in store certainly did not experience time as either homogenous or empty. Anyone who keeps this in mind will perhaps get an idea of how past times were experienced in remembrance - namely, in just the same way. We know how the Jews were prohibited from investigating the future. This stripped the future of its magic, to which all those succumb who turn to the soothsayers for enlightenment. This does not imply, however, that for the Jews the future turned into homogenous, empty time. For every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter."

Highly recommended.

Indispensable reading.......2004-07-23

Benjamin is arguably the twentieth century's most important thinker--if there is anything left to say about our lives, it is surely in this book.

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Mine too, bad glue
Excellent book/poor edition
Essential reading for students of critical theory

The Origin of German Tragic Drama
Walter Benjamin , and George Steiner
Manufacturer: Verso
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 1859844138

Book Description

The Origin of German Tragic Drama is generally acknowledged as Benjamin's most sustained and original work and as one of the main sources of literary modernism in the twentieth century. It begins with a general theoretical introductions on the nature of the baroque art of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, concentrating on the peculiar stage-form of royal martyr dramas called Trauerspiel. Later, Benjamin discusses the engravings of Dürer, and the theatre of Shakespeare and Calderón. Baroque tragedy, he argues was distinguished from classical tragedy by its shift from myth into history.

Customer Reviews:

Mine too, bad glue.......2007-06-20

I found this book interesting. But my book, like that of a previous reviewer, completely fell apart upon the first reading. Frustrating to have to treat my NEW book like some loose sheaf of sibylline leaves bound together with rubber bands.

Excellent book/poor edition.......2006-02-22

Benjamin has written a highly valuable book here. My concern is with Verso's treatment of it. The binding is horrible -- my edition literally fell apart on the first read. There are no annotations which, in a book as wide-ranging and dense as this, is a gross oversight. In short, a horrible edition of a great book. Find another version.

Essential reading for students of critical theory.......2002-08-12

While it concerns baroque Trauerspiel (literally, "mourning play" or "lamentation play," not "tragic drama") this book is necessary reading for students of critical theory who don't have literature as a primary field of interest. In it, Benjamin develops his critique of allegory (which he later amended in his work on Baudelaire and would play a major role in The Arcades Project) as well as his method of philosphical history, which would decisively influence Theodor Adorno (see, for example, Adorno's book on Kierkegaard and his lecture "The Idea of Natural History"). Don't let the notoriously opaque prologue dissuade you from reading beyond the opening pages--the rest of the book has more stylistic and conceptual clarity (which doesn't mean it's easy!). In fact, you may want to skip the prologue and return to it after reading the body of the text. In any case, this book will give you a solid grounding for understanding the foundations of Benjamin's work--it should not be slighted. I deduct a star not because of Benjamin but because of the translation (less than sterling) and Steiner's introduction which, despite correcting the title's translation, restricts itself to literary concerns.

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Das Passagen-Werk (Spanish)
The Capitalist-Fascist Dreamscape, Interpreted
Fragmentary Epic
Humbug
NY Times Review

The Arcades Project
Walter Benjamin
Manufacturer: Belknap Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0674008022

Amazon.com

You could spend years trying to read Walter Benjamin's The Arcades Project--after all, he spent much of the last 13 years of his life doing the research. When he committed suicide in 1940, he destroyed his copy of the manuscript, and so for decades the work was believed lost. But another copy turned up, and Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin have translated it into English. It is a complex, fragmentary work--more a series of notes for a book than a book itself--which probes the culture of the Paris arcades (a cross between covered streets and shopping malls) of the mid-19th century and the flaneur ("the man who walks long and aimlessly through the streets" in an "anamnestic intoxication [that] ... feeds on the sensory data taking shape before his eyes but often possesses itself of abstract knowledge--indeed, of dead facts--as something experienced and lived through"). The Arcades Project is, frankly, so dense a work that one hardly has enough time to glimpse fleetingly at its sections--over 100 pages of notes on Baudelaire alone!--before mentioning it to you, though one certainly looks forward to the opportunity to peruse it at leisure.

Book Description

"To great writers," Walter Benjamin once wrote, "finished works weigh lighter than those fragments on which they labor their entire lives." Conceived in Paris in 1927 and still in progress when Benjamin fled the Occupation in 1940, The Arcades Project (in German, Das Passagen-Werk) is a monumental ruin, meticulously constructed over the course of thirteen years--"the theater," as Benjamin called it, "of all my struggles and all my ideas."

Focusing on the arcades of nineteenth-century Paris-glass-roofed rows of shops that were early centers of consumerism--Benjamin presents a montage of quotations from, and reflections on, hundreds of published sources, arranging them in thirty-six categories with descriptive rubrics such as "Fashion," "Boredom," "Dream City," "Photography," "Catacombs," "Advertising," "Prostitution," "Baudelaire," and "Theory of Progress." His central preoccupation is what he calls the commodification of things--a process in which he locates the decisive shift to the modern age.

The Arcades Project is Benjamin's effort to represent and to critique the bourgeois experience of nineteenth-century history, and, in so doing, to liberate the suppressed "true history" that underlay the ideological mask. In the bustling, cluttered arcades, street and interior merge and historical time is broken up into kaleidoscopic distractions and displays of ephemera. Here, at a distance from what is normally meant by "progress," Benjamin finds the lost time(s) embedded in the spaces of things.

Customer Reviews:

Das Passagen-Werk (Spanish).......2005-05-01

"La huella es la manifestación de una cercanía, por lejos que esté lo que abandona. El aura es la manifestación de una lejanía, por cerca que esté lo que la motiva. En la huella nos apoderamos de la cosa; en el aura ella nos domina." Esta sentencia de Walter Benjamin en LA OBRA DE LOS PASAJES/THE ARCADES PROJECT hace pensar en el proceso acelerado conque la industria a partir del siglo XIX instaura una época caracterizada por la manifestación de esta cercanía debido al consumo y a la accesibilidad masiva de los objetos considerados antes lejanos como el arte culto, por ejemplo. El Passagen-Werk está dedicado a hacer una arqueología de la cultura moderna a través de un diagnóstico sobre la historia y conseguir ver la actualidad del siglo XIX hoy y Benjamin encuentra el origen de la cultura de masas contemporánea en el París del siglo XIX. Así, en el siglo pasado se consiguió, de manera creciente, la destrucción de las relaciones simbolicas y la progresiva desmitifcacion de lo antes considerado sacro mediante la producción creciente de mercancías para el consumo inmediato como la masificación del arte; pero, también, en el siglo pasado, se restableció también nuevas relaciones míticas en el ensueño colectivo de la sociedad de consumo: la glorificación de la industria en las Exposiciones Universales, en los Pasajes, la concepción populista de la política, la exhibición del progreso nacional y la novedad mercantil. Lo simbólico se transformó en fetiche porque cuando antes la legitimidad provenía de la naturaleza tanto en el arte como en las relaciones sociales, es decir, la tradición que progresivamente transforma las convenciones en órdenes naturales; en la industria, la legitimidad proviene precisamente de la idea del progreso, la transformación de la vieja naturaleza mediante la técnica y su consecuente vencimiento para la comodidad de los hombres. Sin embargo, la sacralziacion de la experiencia industrial que se consigue con el consumo mercantil y con la concepción positivista e historicista del progreso informará tanto la ideología de masas como la filosofía culta: el positivismo de Comte y el historicismo de Hegel. La idea de la evolución social, en efecto, glorificaba el curso empírico de la historia humana y daba, en el siglo XIX, justificación filosófica al ordo capitalista. Tomando de Darwin, los filósofos de la época transformaban su teoría de la selección natural en dogma social por el cual, la competencia, en este caso, de clases, era, por supuesto, un hecho natural. Este ejemplo ideológico es excelente para demostrar la reauratización de la vida social. La naturaleza, negada y vencida en la industria, vuelve como referente de legitimación. Sin embargo, bajo el progreso aparente, se esconde la barbarie más profunda, puesto que un estado prehistórico de salvajismo se transcribe en el medio económico de la competencia. La huella trata de encontrar los orígenes históricos del presente; el aura, al contrario, trata de instaurar una naturalización del presente; así como aquella trata de volver cercano el objeto que va desapareciendo en la historia pero para mirarlo con otros ojos, ésta última intenta volver lo presente, lejano, inaccesible, investido con el aura del fetiche mágico. La huella intenta historizar la naturaleza, el aura, naturalizar la historia. Esta dialéctica aplicada a la mercancía se formularía así: en el aura, la mercancía se entiende como alma, fetiche; en la huella, como proceso industrial por el cual los consumidores se identifican entre ellos. La huella no es solamente polemizar contra la barbarie sino demostrar que, aún más, la nueva naturaleza es más transitoria que la anterior. En la huella la discontinuidad del tiempo histórico es afirmada en el sentido que ésta trata de actualizar un objeto que está siendo consumido por la tradición histórica para revelar lo actual que éste posee y, de esta manera, demostrar que la originariedad de los fenómenos modernos residen ya en los objetos despassés. Esta busqueda por las huellas ideologicas de la sociedad industrial avanzada es el objetivo central de Walter Benjamin en esta obra monumental.

The Capitalist-Fascist Dreamscape, Interpreted.......2004-11-30

As the U.S. begins more and more to embrace a cultural, if not yet explicitly political fascism, it's particularly important to look at the response earlier generations made to fascism. Walter Benjamin is a good place for us to start now, and not just because of his fascinating life and tragic death (read about it in the apparatus to The Arcades Project). Benjamin is at his best in examining the allegoric and metaphoric qualities of commercial objects and trends. He tries to understand what products and displays mean. We now live in a culture of declaration rather than fact (WMD in Iraq, the morality of torture, the chorus of creationists on the school board...); even our public discourse works like declarative advertising copy, like propaganda.

Walter Benjamin's interpretation of 19th century Parisian commerce gives us some tools with which to crack the contemporary code.

Stylistically, The Arcades Project works brilliantly. The layering of quotations and themes evokes a dream world, which is part of Benjamin's point: capitalism lulls whole social bodies to sleep, like a narcotic, like an addiction, and provides a phantasmagoria complete enough to keep consensus reality in place. Benjamin's prose sparkles; ideas pop from the page. More good news: you can effectively read around in The Arcades Project; you don't have to read through it cover-to-cover to get the point.

Finally, if you want to understand the impulses of those who are actively transforming the beautiful United States into styrofoam Walmartistan, I humbly suggest that the reader seek out Deleuze and Guattari's study Anti-Oedipus, which examines in detail the ways in which one can desire fascism (and desire in a fascist manner).

Fragmentary Epic.......2000-06-15

In the fifth of his "Theses on History" Benjamin mentions that "every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disapear irretrievably." This work represents a significant way of not forgetting. It is fragmentary...but it reminds us that the texts we read are all fragmentary, and we assemble and contextualize them as we read them.

Humbug.......2000-02-20

This book is a nihilistic, incoherent work, and I dare anyone who reads this review to argue to the contrary. Admiration for this book is humbuggery in action. The emperor has no clothes.

NY Times Review.......2000-01-22

Herbert Muschamp, the NY Times architectural critic, has written an interesting article about Benjamin and his Paris project which appears in the Arts & Leisure section on January 16, 2000. While not strictly speaking a book review it nevertheless offers some observations as to the cultural importance of Benjamin's chef d'oevre. Another book on the Arcades Project is Susan Buck-Morss's 'The Dialectics of Seeing' (MIT 1989, 1991, 1997).

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Berlin Childhood around 1900
Walter Benjamin
Manufacturer: Belknap Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 067402222X

Book Description

Begun in Poveromo, Italy, in 1932, and extensively revised in 1938, Berlin Childhood around 1900 remained unpublished during Walter Benjamin's lifetime, one of his "large-scale defeats." Now translated into English for the first time in book form, on the basis of the recently discovered "final version" that contains the author's own arrangement of a suite of luminous vignettes, it can be more widely appreciated as one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century prose writing.

Not an autobiography in the customary sense, Benjamin's recollection of his childhood in an upper-middle-class Jewish home in Berlin's West End at the turn of the century becomes an occasion for unified "expeditions into the depths of memory." In this diagram of his life, Benjamin focuses not on persons or events but on places and things, all seen from the perspective of a child--a collector, flaneur, and allegorist in one.

This book is also one of Benjamin's great city texts, bringing to life the cocoon of his childhood--the parks, streets, schoolrooms, and interiors of an emerging metropolis. It reads the city as palimpsest and labyrinth, revealing unexpected lyricism in the heart of the familiar.

As an added gem, a preface by Howard Eiland discusses the genesis and structure of the work, which marks the culmination of Benjamin's attempt to do philosophy concretely.

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Excellent book.
The Original Diplomat

A Benjamin Franklin Reader
Walter Isaacson
Manufacturer: Simon & Schuster
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0743273982

Book Description

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN'S GREATEST WRITINGS

Edited and Annotated by Walter Isaacson

Selected and annotated by the author of the acclaimed Benjamin Franklin: An American Life, this collection of Franklin's writings shows why he was the bestselling author of his day and remains America's favorite founder and wit. Includes an introductory essay exploring Franklin's life and impact as a writer, and each piece is accompanied by a preface and notes that provide background, context, and analysis.

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"Selected and annotated by the author of the acclaimed Benjamin Franklin: An American Life, this collection of Franklin's writings shows why he was the bestselling author of his day and remains America's favorite Founder and wit. As a twelve-year-old apprentice in his brother's print shop, Benjamin Franklin taught himself to be a writer by taking notes on the works of great essayists such as Addison and Steele, jumbling them up, and then trying to recreate them in his own words. By that method, he recalled in his Autobiography, he was encouraged to think he might become a ""tolerable"" writer. In fact, he became the best, most popular, and most influential writer in colonial America. His direct and practical prose shaped America's democratic character, and his homespun humor gave birth to the nation's unique brand of crackerbarrel wisdom. This book collects dozens of Franklin's delight-ful essays and letters, along with a complete version of his Autobiography. It includes an introductory essay exploring Franklin's life and impact as a writer, and each piece is accompanied by a preface and notes that provide background, context, and analysis. Through the writings and the introductory essays, the reader can trace the development of Franklin's thinking, along with the birth of the nation he and his pen helped to invent. "

Customer Reviews:

Excellent book. .......2007-04-13

This is a fine selection from Franklin's writings, including the entire 'Autobiography'. All texts have been judiciously chosen by the editor, arranged in chronological order and prefaced by intelligent, concise and well written introductory notes. Franklin's importance and permanence clearly emerge from the reading.

I only wish there were more excerpts from Franklin's delightful 'Poor Richard's Almanac'. The selections presented in this edition come from the Almanacs for the years 1733, 1734, 1736, 1737, 1738 and 1739, and they barely fill 15 pages. Nonetheless they might well satisfy the reader and in any event there is plenty of rarely published letters and articles from the Pennsylvania Gazette to make up for the possible lack of material from the almanacs signed by 'Richard Saunders'.

This is the perfect book to discover Franklin and also a very good one for those who already know him, thanks to the editors insightful notes and to the opportunity to review Franklin's writings in chronological order, from a historical and biographical perspective.

The Original Diplomat.......2006-05-25

This is a great collection of the writings of Benjamin Franklin. For me, the real value here lies not so much in the fact that he was a self-made man, but in the advice he gave about connecting with people and interacting with others both from a business and from a personal point of view. His ability in that area led directly to his success (along with some luck). I wish more people read the Autobiography and other papers just for that reason alone. In the long run, that may be the greatest contribution made by Ben Franklin.

Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 1, 1913-1926 (Walter Benjamin)

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An Excellent Introduction
Endlessly fascinating...

Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 1, 1913-1926 (Walter Benjamin)
Walter Benjamin
Manufacturer: Belknap Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0674945859

Amazon.com

A leading German critic of his day and a member of the generation scarred by the First World War, Walter Benjamin's writing career was marked by deep philosophical insights and tumultuous emotional crises. His work has mostly been unavailable in English translations, but this collection marks the first of three proposed volumes of his essays. In his early work, we encounter Benjamin as an idealistic university student and come to see him commenting on the aesthetics of such subjects as morality in children's books, the uses of force and violence, and writers such as Goethe and Dostoyevsky.

Book Description

Walter Benjamin was one of the most original and important critical voices of the twentieth century, but until now only a few of his writings have been available in English. Harvard University Press has now undertaken to publish a significant portion of his work in definitive translation, under the general editorship of Michael W. Jennings. This volume, the first of three, will at last give readers of English a true sense of the man and the mans' theets of his thought. A separate volume will consist of his book The Arcades Project, the magnum opus of his Paris years.

The writer Walter Benjamin emerged our of the head-on collision of an idealistic youth movement and the First World War, which Benjamin and his close friends thought immoral. He walked away from the wreck scarred yet determined "to be considered as the principal critic of German literature." But the scene as he found it was dominated by "talented fakes," so-to use his words-"only a terrorist campaign would I suffice" to effect radical change. This book offers the record of the first phase of that campaign, culminating with "One-Way Street," one of the most significant products of the German avant-garde of the Twenties. Against conformism, homogeneity, and gentrification of all life into a new world order, Benjamin made the word his sword.

Volume I of the Selected Writings brings together essays long and short, academic treatises, reviews, fragments, and privately circulated pronouncements. Fully five-sixths of this material has never before been translated into English. The contents begin in 1913, when Benjamin, as an undergraduate in imperial Germany, was president of a radical youth group, and take us through 1926, when he had already begun, with his explorations of the world of mass culture, to emerge as a critical voice in Weimar Germany's most influential journals.

The volume includes a number of his most important works, including "Two Poems by Friedrich Hölderlin," "Goethe's Elective Affinities," "The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism," "The Task of the Translator," and "One-Way Street." He is as compelling and insightful when musing on riddles or children's books as he is when dealing with weightier issues such as the philosophy of language, symbolic logic, or epistemology. We meet Benjamin the youthful idealist, the sober moralist, the political theorist, the experimentalist, the translator, and, above all, the virtual king of criticism, with his magisterial exposition of the basic problems of aesthetics.

Benjamin's sentences provoke us to return to them again and again, luring us as though with the promise of some final revelation that is always being postponed. He is by turns fierce and tender, melancholy and ebullient; he is at once classically rooted, even archaic, in his explorations of the human psyche and the world of things, and strikingly progressive in his attitude toward society and what he likes to call the organs of the collective (its architectures, fashions, signboards). Throughout, he displays a far-sighted urgency, judging the present on the basis of possible futures. And he is gifted with a keen sense of humor. Mysterious though he may sometimes be (his Latvian love, Asia Lacis, once described him as a visitor from another planet), Benjamin remains perhaps the most consistently surprising and challenging of critical writers.

Customer Reviews:

An Excellent Introduction.......2000-11-24

Walter Benjamin has progressed over the years from an obscure lesser member of the Frankfurt School to a widely read leading member of that obscure school. Aided by such as Hannah Arendt, who introduced him to a wider audience in her writings (and also to me), readers have come to appreciate Benjamin for the beauty of his writing as well as his sharp insight.

This volume, along with its companion, is an excellent introduction to the style and thought of this man who, while out of step with his times, possessed the insight to give those times an original critique.

Possessed of a lively style and free from the Marxist bagge that weighs down his Frankfurt School colleagues such as Adorno and Horkheimer (I think Benjamin owes much more to Heidegger than Marx), Benjamin will hook any reader who takes the time to spend an hour or two with this book. From here it's an easy step to purchase other Benjamin writings, a step I can almost guarantee.

Endlessly fascinating..........1998-08-07

While his work is as important as Barthes, Foucault, or Derrida, or any other critic of the 20th Century, Benjamin's work has a mystical quality, a kind of enchantment, that resonates much more than any other critic I have read. It is always human and sensitive, even despite his determinedly impersonal tone.

When I think of Benjamin, I think of Emerson's famous line about Hawthorne - that he was a greater man than any of his works betray. The integrity and character of Walter Benjamin shines through his works, and is an inspiration to anyone who takes literature seriously.

Book Description

Beginning with Tennyson's In Memoriam and continuing by way of Hopkins and Swinburne to the novels of Oscar Wilde and Thomas Hardy, Richard Dellamora draws on journals, letters, censored texts, and pornography to examine the cultural construction of masculinity in Victorian literature.

Central to the struggle over the meaning of masculine desire was the institutional politics of Oxford University, where Benjamin Jowett, Matthew Arnold, John Ruskin, and Walter Pater were principal players. As a young man in the 1860s, Pater, the art historian, essayist, and novelist, theorized a place for desire between men in cultural formation and critique. Later, in a climate of growing intolerance, he continued to affirm male-male desire but with increasing attention to the social functions of homophobia. Dellamora shows that discontent with conventional gender roles animated efforts to reimagine the possibilities of masculine existence.

Customer Reviews:

Speak..and Enlighten...Sexual AND Academic Victorian Modes.........2002-06-29

This is an incredibly insightful, well argued, and superbly
interesting study of male desire and its effects on Victorian
culture. A major part of the focus of this study concerns
the interacting awarenesses, defenses, attacks, and
deflections of male same-sex attraction AND desire,
and the various responses to those two factors
in relation to the classical Greek writings and art
as they influenced the thoughts and creativity of
Victorian male lives, especially in the academic
centers of Cambridge and Oxford Universities.
This study is very readable, even though the
first paragraph of the "Introduction" sounds too
"academic," the rest of the Introduction explains
the focus. The author of this work, Richard Dellamora,
is working with or against various ideas
expressed in the writings of Michel Foucault [History of
Sex: Vol. 1 An Introduction; Vol. _The Use of Pleasure_],
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick [_Between Men: English Literature and
Male Homosocial Desire_], Elaine Showalter [_The Female
Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830-1980_;
_A Literature of Their Own_]and other writers on sexuality
and gender, dealing with the Victorian period.
But this is no "he says; she says..." study. It is
truly a remarkable and incredibly insightful and
interesting, well focused and clearly presented work.
It is a very important source of knowledge and study
in its own right--this author has well studied and
knows the people, their works, and the issues and
arguments involved. He clearly and inspiringly explains
the meanings of the works, their major ideas, and the
counter ideas, and where each is focused
in its arguments. But the work is not dry reading.
Dellamora deals with male desire as it is
expressed in the works of both those male writers
whose affections and interests are focused on the male
exclusively, as well as with those males who have
sought the expression of their life association and

sexuality with women,but who have nonetheless been
aware of, been participants in, and been celebrators
of profound male bonding desire,
even if not of a sexual nature. Indeed, Dellamora's
main argument is that the history of the presentation
of male desire in the 19th century English cultural
context transcends the limitation imposed by the idea
that only "homosexuals" would be aware of, feel,
or desire such male oriented caring. That idea breaks
the stereotype and opens up (liberates) the cultural
strictures and impositions that sadly still dominate
willingness to talk of male desire and sexuality in
some academic writings, especially in the United States.
Mr. Dellamora is professor of English and Cultural Studies
at Trent University in Ontario [according to the back cover].
The chapter titles help to show the range and excellent
areas of analysis by the author, who knows and uses the
writings, letters, and sources extremely well. The titles
are: Introduction-Masculine Desire and the Question of the
Subject; (1) Tennyson, the Apostles, and _In Memoriam_; (2)
"Spousal Love" in the Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins; (3)
[Walter]Pater at Oxford in 1864--Old Mortality and
"Diaphaneite"; (4) Poetic Perversities of A. C. Swinburne;
Excursus--Hopkins, Swinburne, and the Whitmanian Signifier;
(5) [Matthew]Arnold, Winckelmann, and [Walter] Pater;
(6) John Ruskin and the Character of Male Genius; (7)
Leonardo, Medusa, and the Wish to be Woman; (8) "The New
Chivalry" and Oxford Politics (the contest to elect a new
Professor of Poetry at Oxford; the influences of Walter
Pater, John Addington Symonds, and Jowett);
9)Theorizing Homophobia--Analysis of Myth in Pater;
(10) Homosexual Scandal and Compulsory Heterosexuality
in the 1890s; Afterword--The Subject of Sexual (In)difference.
The Bibliography at the back of this book is
exceptional, interesting, and informative (in terms of
future sources that one might wish to consult or
purchase for one's own use). It is filled with both
essay and book entries, but all of a highly
intellectual and culturally stimulating kind.
Dellamora presents here a thorough, well studied,
well analyzed, and totally enlightening work. It is
well worth the purchase by any reader interested in
the subjects of male desire, cultural impact, and
artistic expression.
His exceptional gift in this work is to use letters
and journals to show the range of feelings and

expressions -- the letters between Arthur Hallam
to Richard Milnes and the expressions between
Tennyson and Hallam are incredibly interesting
(as well as being something one would not be
able to easily access from other sources). The other
personages inovlved in the Apostles and
their interests and expressions and doings
provide great insight also in understanding
more fully the context of the cultural and personal
interactions that were going on at both Cambridge
and Oxford in the 1800s.
[Byron and Tennyson attended Cambridge;
Pater, Hopkins (tutored by Pater), Symonds,
Ruskin, and Wilde attended Oxford.]
Notice: Dellamora uses the words which
the writers of the works and the letters use --
both Latinate and common. The words have both
to do with bodily parts and sexual acts, so the
general reader should be aware. But none of
this is presented in a sensationalist fashion, rather
as an enlightening insight into the thoughts and ideas
that motivated, influenced, and found expression (or
repression) in the lives of the experiencers. This is
NOT a book about sex or about sex acts -- it is about
ideas and desires and their influences on personal
motivations, strivings, and artistic expressions.

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A great intellectual friendship and a tragic end

Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship (New York Review Books Classics)
Gershom Gerhard Scholem
Manufacturer: NYRB Classics
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 2, part 2, 1931-1934 (Walter Benjamin)

The Messianic Idea in Judaism: And Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality

The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 1910-1940

Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption (Weimar and Now : German Cultural Criticism, No 7)

Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 3, 1935-1938

ASIN: 1590170326
Release Date: 2003-04-30

Book Description

Gershom Scholem is celebrated as the twentieth century's most profound student of the Jewish mystical tradition; Walter Benjamin, as a master thinker whose extraordinary essays mix the revolutionary, the revelatory, and the esoteric. Scholem was a precocious teenager when he met Benjamin, who became his close friend and intellectual mentor. His account of that relationshipÑwhich was to remain crucial for both menÑis both a celebration of his friend's spellbinding genius and a lament for the personal and intellectual self-destructiveness that culminated in Benjamin's suicide in 1940.

At once prickly and heartbroken, argumentative and loving, Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship is an absorbing memoir with the complication of character and motive of a novel. As Scholem revisits the passionate engagements over Marxism and Kabbala, Europe and Palestine that he shared with Benjamin, it is as if he sought to summon up his lost friend's spirit again, to have the last word in the argument that might have saved his life.

Customer Reviews:

A great intellectual friendship and a tragic end .......2004-12-14

This is the story of a friendship between two of the most remarkable intellectual figures of the twentieth century , Gershom Scholem and Walter Benjamin. It begins in Berlin in 1914 and continues through their separation until Benjamin's tragic death twenty -five years later. Both of them were greatly interested in the historical processes of their times, in philology , in the meaning of signs and symbols, in Socialism, in Zionism. Scholem left Germany for the Jerusalem of pre- state Israel and became a central figure there in the development of the Hebrew University. He became too the great scholar who opened a new field that of Jewish Mysticism. Benjamin hesitated and seemed to always find the way to misfortune. But their conversation and their friendship illuminates fundamental issues of life and thought. This book should be read by everyone for whom the life of the mind is important.

One-Way Street and Other Writings (The Verso Classics Series)

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One-Way Street and Other Writings (The Verso Classics Series)
Walter Benjamin
Manufacturer: Verso Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 185984197X

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