Lonewordsmith Selects 2012 Back List : The Metaphysical Club

Lonewordsmith concentrates on books that fire up your content: fiction or non-fiction.

Like the magazine writer that he is and the academician he is, Louis Menand springs, not strolls, into his passionate account of American ideas in the 201th Century.

ISBN 0-374-52849-7 ( pbk)                                         

Published in 2001 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux won Pulitzer Prize

Professor of English, The New Yorker article contributor, Louis Menand

The Metaphysical Club pursues a witch hunt that paces through a tale of happenstance, mental groping and personality sleuthing. It looks down on the accidental collision of a small group of great American minds.

The book is based on evidence and a large amount of analyzing. It displays traces of modern crime fiction and an identical, evidential piling of questions, answers and the blaming.

So what was his theme?

The Civil War swept away the slave civilization of the South, but it swept away almost the whole intellectual culture of the North along with it. It took nearly half a century for the United States to develop a clear culture, and a way of thinking, that would help people to cope with the conditions of modern life. That struggle is the subject of this book.

There it is.

A blogging specialist might now call the driving force of its site: the theme, or the ‘creative arc’.

But whatever you call it, all effective writing: sets out on a journey for its reader, unravels its details and draws the threads together in the end (or promises to in the next episode).

The take-away?

If you look back at Menand says above, you notice that it gives the impression of being somewhat of an elevator pitch. Theme, arc or elevator pitch, is often the shape of a strong piece of ‘content’.  

 

Here is someone else’s description and opinion on this book:

A riveting, original book about the creation of the modern American mind. The Metaphysical Club was an informal group that met in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1872, to talk about ideas. Its members included Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., founder of modern jurisprudence; William James, the father of modern American psychology; and Charles Sanders Peirce, logician, scientist, and the founder of semiotics. The Club was probably in existence for about nine months. No records were kept. The one thing we know that came out of it was an idea – an idea about ideas.    by the anon Amazon Com bot

“What is enthralling and illuminating about The Metaphysical Club is its portraits of individuals and their milieus. Menand is wonderfully deft at evoking a climate of ideas or a cultural sensibility, embodying it in a character, and moving his characters into and out of one another’s lives. What might have been a jumble of intellectual movements and colorful minor figures (…) is instead a subtle weave of entertaining narrative and astute interpretation.” – George Scialabba , The American Prospect

And one snippet of a review that skids close to (or fends off) the negative, but escapes the fall:

“(A) story of almost ludicrous breadth and depth, winding around handwriting analysis, birds, racism, railroads, universities, and God. The threat of philosophical textbookism hovers in the margins, but Menand’s determination to “see ideas as always soaked through by the personal and social situations in which we find them” fends off that danger with sometimes dazzling effect.” – Ron Charles, Christian Science Monitor

Astute, entertaining narrative, enthralling and illuminating, a subtle weave (?). dazzling effect, philosophical textbookism (wow).

All this comment about an excursion among ideas?  Could be a rich source of the way to write, anything   All you must do is some thinking sideways as Alan Fletcher suggested.

Alan Fletcher’s Design for his own book

If you would like to check up on this suggestion for a book you will come back to again, you might try looking at Amazon.com or your regular supkier of boks of quality.

Neil McPherson is a former broadcaster and journalist who now lives in Germany and writes novels and short pieces for publication. Information about his coming projects is described  by clicking here.

Love to have your comments on this post and of course the book from my backlist: The Metaphysical Club by Louis Menand