Commemorates an immensely erudite academic community, a global Republic of Letters, drawn from many nations and disciplines. Now in his late 80s, Brown looks back on those years and the people he met with nostalgia and gratitude ... Brown explores the complexities of late antiquity by asking seemingly simple questions with sometimes unexpected answers ... Besides being an enthralling account of an eminent scholar at work, Journeys of the Mind can also function as an annotated guide to dozens of important works of intellectual history ... Brown’s prose is pellucid, meditative, courteous ... I’ve read lots of autobiographies...but none that quite so vividly depicts a life, a deeply enviable life, centered on humanistic research and the reading and writing of scholarly works. In its way, Journeys of the Mind may well be the most romantic book of the year.
This meticulous and lively account of his intellectual development lovingly acknowledges all the scholars—from his school days onward—whose work helped shape his own. Written primarily for historians, it is also accessible and interesting to general readers ... For academics, to read Brown’s memoir is to survey the first three decades of a field that he has almost come to represent. For the common reader, it is to discover a period little-known but full of vibrant, complex societies with many similarities to our own. For all readers, this book offers no less than a template for how to live, in an uncertain world, while surrounded by death and the unraveling of all we know: that is, in generous recognition of our teachers, with boundless curiosity, and buoyed by the delight of lifelong scholarship.
Gripping ... This is not a conventional autobiography. Its 700 pages, which take us from Brown’s1940s childhood to the mid-1980s, are studded with deliberate silences. Though he writes voluminously about his extended Irish family and tenderly of his parents, he largely passes over his private life ... Although Journeys of the Mind is a vivid and droll guide to Brown’s role in advancing the historiography of late antiquity, it is also a sustained and moving meditation on how historians of any faith cope with the strangeness of its past.
