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Title: The First and the Last by Isaiah Berlin ISBN: 0-940322-09-9 Publisher: New York Review of Books Pub. Date: 01 October, 1999 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4 (1 review)
Rating: 4
Summary: A Good Summation
Comment: "The First and the Last" contains Isaiah Berlin's earliest surving extended piece of writing ("First"), his final essay ("Last") summarizing his intellectual path and development, and brief tributes by Noel Annan, Stuart Hampshire, Avishai Margalit, Bernard Williams, and Aileen Kelly.
The tributes give us a faint glimmer of the man: his humanity and generosity, his passion for music, especially opera, and his extraordinary devotion to friends and students. "You have beautiful black eyes," Greta Garbo once said to Berlin. In Oxford circles Berlin was as renowned for his vivid talk and character as for his ideas. However, these recollections only hint at Berlin's expressiveness and luminous personality. In this regard, Michael Ignatieff's illumnating biography provides a more rounded treatment and measure of the man.
"First" is a prize winning story entered in a children's magazine competition when the Berlin was twelve years of age. The short story concerns a murderous bolshevik commisar named Uritsky, whose motto is "the purpose justifies the ways". Aside from revealing his precocity, the story is meant to illustrate Berlin's lifelong thematic struggle with absolutism in all its forms.
Berlin's last essay "My Intellectual Journey" is the principal and only substantive essay in this volume. It traces the the main themes of Berlin's intellectual journey, from his early interest in verificationism and phenomenalism, his discovery of Vico and Herder, his treatment of Romanticism, his famous formulation of two senses of "Liberty", and his contrast of monism with political pluralism. The writing is lucid and serves as a good synopsis of Berlin's political pluralism, which he summarizes as "a product of reading Vico and Herder, and of understanding the roots of Romanticism, which in its violent, pathological form went too far for human toleration".
Noel Annan once compared Berlin's writings to a Seurat, "a pointilliste who peppers his canvas with a fusillade of adjectives, epithets, phrases, analogies, examples, elucidations and explanations so that at least a particular idea, a principle of action, a vision of life, emerges before our eyes in all its complexity." The force and brilliance of Berlin's writings is found elsewhere. Nevertheless, "The First and the Last" is worth reading. For it is the one and only place where we find Berlin's own summation of his intellectual development alongside a modest tribute by his friends and admirers.
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Title: Plan of Attack by Bob Woodward ISBN: 074325547X Publisher: Simon & Schuster Pub. Date: 19 April, 2004 List Price(USD): $28.00 |
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Title: My Life by Bill Clinton ISBN: 0375414576 Publisher: Knopf Pub. Date: 22 June, 2004 List Price(USD): $35.00 |
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