...exemplary ... In this biography, Nietzsche steps out of the mists of obfuscation and rumor, vividly evoked with his beautiful manners and ridiculous mustache ... What is illuminated here owes as much to Prideaux’s sensibility as her approach ... his letters can be wildly funny and full of comic set pieces. Prideaux relishes this side of him. It helps that she is something of a specialist in the lives of histrionic male geniuses of the 19th century ... What Prideaux contributes is mainly shading and psychological insight ... an attentive, scrupulous portrait.
Dense, complex and hilarious, which is a rare and winning combination ... a wonderful book and I say that having almost certainly misunderstood quite a lot of it. I shall read it again, more than once. it is just such a blast to read. Witty, terribly clever and steeped in the wild, doomed peculiarities of 19th-century Germania, it is a tremendous and reformative biography of a man whom popular history has perhaps done a disservice. Is this man, Prideaux asks, really to be remembered through the lens of a sister who never truly understood him at all?
Wonderfully readable ... It is, just about, possible to recommend this book as an introduction to Nietzsche’s philosophy ... but its real strengths lie in the quality of its writing and the way it deals with Nietzsche’s relations with the remarkably few people with whom he was close. Other writers have tried to get inside Nietzsche’s mind, but in using her empathic imagination to understand Nietzsche’s relations with his mother, his sister, his friends, his publisher, and even his landlords, Prideaux is able to offer us a valuable new perspective, one in which he emerges as a unique and endlessly fascinating person, but nevertheless a person to whom we can relate.
The best parts of Prideaux’s book focus on Nietzsche’s infatuation and his later break with Richard Wagner and Cosima von Bülow — the illegitimate daughter of Franz Liszt — who invited the young scholar to become part of their inner circle at their villa on Lake Lucerne ... Prideaux ends her book deploring the Nazification of Nietzsche’s legacy, but without ever asking whether Nietzsche bears any responsibility for this misappropriation. Why did he write in a way that permitted such misuse? Dangerous thinkers should expect to attract dangerous followers ... Prideaux clearly knows her way around the world of European high modernism. She is strong on Nietzsche’s life, but much less so on his ideas. In fact, apart from Nietzsche’s ideas, his life is of relatively little import. She does little to explain what makes Nietzsche an enduring philosopher who continues to exercise great influence. Nor does she attempt to put Nietzsche in the context of his great fin de siècle contemporaries and admirers including William James, Freud, Gide and Shaw, among many others.
... masterful ... What sets Prideaux’s biography apart from previous accounts of Nietzsche’s life is its vibrant intimacy. Eschewing philosophical rigorousness for human proximity, Prideaux quite simply gets closer to Nietzsche than anyone before her. The Zarathustrian mask falls away and the vulnerable human is bared.
Succeeds where many have failed ... Hers is but one version of an extremely twisted and mystical story, yet it is, for all those caveats, one of the best attempts. This is in large part due to Prideaux's willingness to throw dynamite into the bullet points ... [Prideaux] braids the strands of philosophy and biography together with this historian's flair for storytelling ... I Am Dynamite! wins the day because it's written in a style that eerily parallels that of Nietzsche himself. The writing is poetic and spirited, zigzagging amongst quotations and paraphrasing and editorializing with astonishing alacrity for such a frequently bleak subject. She can go tit for tat on ornate and romantic syntax to set the scene and sweep across Nietzsche's best hopes for himself, then turn around and decimate the results with a brisk humor and aphoristic finality ... will please well-versed philosophers, but it's also a lovely introductory story for those that do not know Nietzsche well.
Splendid ... a beautifully written, and often intensely moving, account of a life devoted to the achievement of intellectual greatness and the exploration of the conditions for its flourishing ... masterful.
Here is Nietzsche as most of us have not encountered him before: self-deprecating (he loses his trousers and finds it funny), unpredictable and, above all, sociable – friends arrive and leave, he dribbles away time in a popular student restaurant before finally gearing up to meet the great man. Even more remarkably, Prideaux resists the temptation to editorialise, to tug nervously at our sleeve to make sure we’ve got the point that Nietzsche is so much more than the sinister pin-up of mid-century fascists and serial killers ... The great pleasure of Prideaux’s sprightly biography is watching philosophy in the making. Reading about Nietzsche’s life, which had as many false starts and wrong turns as anyone else’s, is to be reminded that systems of thought do not arrive unbidden in the library or the lecture hall, but are worked out in the mess of everyday life ... Academic philosophers may feel that there is not much new to detain them here. For the rest of us, this biography is nothing short of a revelation, a sort of word made flesh.
... ambitious and stylistically accomplished ... While there are better primers on Nietzsche’s philosophy out there... Prideaux’s book is the most seamless in its treatment of the material. Her sensory awareness reflects Nietzsche’s own development as an intensely subjective philosopher ... While [the book's] ending feels like a capitulation of sorts, Prideaux’s stylistic virtuosity and narrative talent has carved a much wider entry point to Nietzsche’s life and thought, setting a new standard for the genre.
Carefully examining both human drama and conceptual argument, Prideaux plumbs the turbulent depths of spirit hidden behind Nietzsche’s sunny affability ... With laudable lucidity, Prideaux explicates why Nietzsche hailed the emergence of the fearless Superman ... Compelling treatment of both the enigmatic man and his iconoclastic thought.
Scintillating ... Prideaux is at pains to show that his philosophy focused on the “need to overcome ourselves,” not others. Nietzsche often compared his writing to dancing, and Prideaux’s invigorating study captures the joyous and often ebullient character of this writer’s deeply influential work.
