Michael Ignatieff
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Isaiah Berlin: A Life
Michael Ignatieff
Isaiah Berlin was witness to a century. Born in Riga in the twilight of the Czarist empire, he lived long enough to see the Soviet state collapse. The son of a Jewish timber merchant, he became a presiding judge of Western intellectual life on both sides of the Atlantic: historian of the Russian intelligentsia, biographer of Marx, scholar of the Romantic movement, and defender of the liberal idea of freedom against Soviet tyranny. When he died in 1997, he was hailed as the most important liberal philosopher of his time.
But Berlin’s life was not only a life of the mind. Present at the crucial events of our age, he was in Washington during World War II, in Moscow at the dawn of the Cold War, and dining with President John F. Kennedy on the eve of the Cuban Missile Crisis. From Albert Einstein to Virginia Woolf, Winston Churchill to Anna Akhmatova, his circle of friends constitutes a veritable who’s who of twentieth century art, politics, and philosophy.
In this definitive work, the result of a remarkable ten-year collaboration between biographer and subject, Michael Ignatieff charts…
Michael Ignatieff
At the heart of Michael Ignatieff’s riveting novel about a woman’s descent into neurological illness are the tangled threads of a Midwestern family, frayed by time and tragedy yet still connected—as much by pride, embarrassed love, and sibling rivalry as by the painful ties of familial loyalty.
A philosophy professor watches helplessly as his mother sinks into the mysterious depths of an unknown illness. His efforts to understand her gradual deterioration—from innocently misplaced eyeglasses and endlessly repeated anecdotes to a total loss of identity—lead him to reach out to his estranged brother, a neurologist, to learn all he can of the disease. Yet medical science is as powerless as philosophy to help them comprehend what is happening to her and to them, to explain the relation between brain and mind, between memory and selfhood, between heart and soul. The narrator, distrusting the usual explanations for his mother’s tragedy, begins, dangerously, to lose his own bearings, as he senses how deeply his family—and life—have been transformed.
Yet Scar Tissue affirms…
