In his enjoyable book, Eilenberger manages to convey not only his characters’ complicated lives but the convoluted flow of their endlessly agitated minds ... The ceaseless intellectual questing of all four makes for fascinating reading.
The Visionaries is much better than Eilenberger’s previous group biography ... This new book... illuminates the times through which these philosophers developed their ideas – and vice versa – often drawing poignant parallels and discontinuities between the women. But his evident and understandable fondness for Weil skews the book.
Ambitious, enthralling ... What do these four women have in common? Not much ... I would have appreciated a little more direction. Without it, you float from one mind to another: thrilling, but slightly disorientating. This book demands close attention; it rewards rereading; it tackles big ideas unapologetically. In short, Eilenberger treats you like a grown-up ... This is a wonderful book. But I get the sense that Eilenberger really wanted to write a book about Weil, and was slightly irritated at having to include her peers.
This is where the significance of Eilenberger’s story really lies. Not one of these women was defending existing freedoms, because not one of them had ever been able to take freedom for granted in the first place ... All four women walked on the outside of power, politics, and philosophy, which is why their vision of what the world had become by the middle of the 20th century is so acute.
While never quite providing a cohesive rationale for joining these four disparate writers together, Eilenberger offers solid insight into a center-minded way of thinking applicable to each ... An absorbing, well-grounded study.
Illuminating ... Though Eilenberger could sometimes weave the narrative’s various threads together more seamlessly, his energetic, multilayered group portrait reveals that these celebrated thinkers were real people whose ideas, as contradictory as they may seem, developed in response to shared social or political circumstances.
