MixedLos Angeles Review of BooksMenand serves up a vast, rambling, exhaustively researched, and highly personal helicopter survey ... Menand’s blizzards of dates and statistics bury the reader under deep drifts of Too Much Information. No one can accuse the author of not doing his homework, but maybe he spent too much time in his office in the stacks of the Widener Library (for which he expresses gratitude in his acknowledgments) and not enough making sense of the thousands of books and articles he has consumed ... He has committed the fatal sin of biographers and historians: falling in love with his sources ... The only way I could make my way through this massive tome was in very small doses, like reading separate entries in an encyclopedia ... There are some bright spots. His chapter on Hannah Arendt...conveys both the drama of her life (a last-minute escape from Nazi-occupied France through Lisbon to the United States) and the prophetic power of her ideas ... Unfortunately, Menand seems himself to have disregarded what he describes as one of the principles of the historicist hermeneutics she practiced: \'History is not facts, but the meaning of facts.\'
