BERTRAND RUSSELL: The Spirit of Solitude 1872-1921 (Hardcover)

~ (Author) "'I shall never lose the sense of being a ghost,' Russell once wrote to his lover, Ottoline Morrell..." (more)
Key Phrases: Lady Russell, Pembroke Lodge, Lucy Donnelly (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Volume I of Ray Monk's life of Bertrand Russell is a penetrating and highly critical portrait of one of this century's most influential intellectual figures. Monk's talents as a writer and his knowledge of philosophy produce clear and lucid prose that is sophisticated in its understanding, yet doesn't shy away from the dishy details that make the book compelling. This initial volume takes us through the first fifty years of Russell's private, public, and intellectual life. We follow Russell through his boyhood and schooling, his two marriages and countless love affairs, his friendships with eminent intellectuals such as Joseph Conrad, T. S. Eliot (plus an affair with Eliot's wife Vivien), and the members of the Bloomsbury Group, up to the birth of Russell's son in 1921. The inner Russell is tumultuous, fighting off fears of madness, and full of insatiable longings. We also see Russell's public life: his outspoken commitment to pacifism which ultimately led to his imprisonment, as well as his early advocacy and later disillusionment with socialism. Ray Monk is particularly adept at explicating Russell's philosophy: his desire to bring an end to interminable philosophical debates by developing new techniques for the logical analysis of philosophical problems. In Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius, Monk demonstrated that cracking good stories exist in the arcana of academic philosophy and in the lives of philosophers. The vastness of Russell's life and the breadth of his interests, in addition to the brilliance of his mind, makes Monk's story all the more captivating.

From Publishers Weekly

At age 30, philosopher and philanderer Russell (1872-1970) wrote, "Abstract work must be allowed to destroy one's humanity." His life into his 50th year is the subject of Monk's first volume of a two-part biography. As previous biographers have found, his competition is Russell's own mesmerizing yet unreliable memoirs. Monk (Wittgenstein) quotes extensively from Russell's correspondence and autobiographical writings, but always with a gloss on the facts. Russell's compulsive womanizing kept at bay loneliness, and worse. His mother and father died when he was a boy, and he saw insanity in his aristocratic lineage. Mathematics, his first love, lay on the edge of philosophy, and he feared that inquiring too deeply into the wellsprings of the self would lead to madness. The loss, also, of Victorian certainties intensified his sense of solitude, and his compensatory quests into logic, politics and sex left him questioning (as Monk puts it) "whether it was better to be sane with lies or mad with truth." When the biography breaks off, he has married for a second time, been to jail, been expelled from his Cambridge professorship and written landmark books on mathematics, politics and philosophy. By then D.H. Lawrence has wounded Russell by accusing him of a paradox: that while Russell loves women sexually and loves logic professionally, "It is not the hatred of falsity which inspires you. It is the hatred of people, of flesh and blood." Mining Russell's papers to let him speak for himself, Monk lets him explain?and betray?himself. Illustrations not seen by PW.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 720 pages
• Publisher: Free Press (October 11, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0684828022
• ISBN-13: 978-0684828022
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.5 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,012,088 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One genius or two?, February 21, 1999

By A Customer

Ray Monk makes it clear in this book that he dislikes Russell.

As a hitherto ardent Russophile, this ought to have given me cause for concern that I would find problems with this book.

I nonetheless recommend it to even those of a similar disposition to myself, it is probably the best biography (of any subject) that I have ever read.

It attempts to be more probing and insightful (and thus results in being more contentious) than anything I have ever read concerning Russell's motivations, both conscious and otherwise.

For someone who has taken us so far towards appreciating the tragic explanations for their subject's weaknesses, Ray Monk himself perhaps needs to explain why dislike has emerged rather than sysmpathy.

Or perhaps answering this question is ultimately a job for this biographer's biographer?

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Best Russell Bio To Date, December 18, 2000

By	Edward Garea "Edward Garea" (Branchville, New Jersey United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Question: How would Ray Monk follow his wildly successful biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein? Answer: He takes on the life of Wittgenstein's teacher, and the most public philosopher of the 20th century, Bertrand Russell.

There are a myriad of biographies of Russell in and out of print; even the most ardent Russell admirer could easily admit burnout on this score. Russell himself penned an autobiography that lends itself more to literature than fact. Why should one spend money and time on yet another biography?

Two reasons should suffice, I hope. Monk is a thorough biographer, but not an adoring one. Although some others have also been critical, none brings to the subject the background in analytical philosophy that Monk does, and this is an important factor when discussing the life and thought of a philosopher, for both are obviously and subtly interwined in the subject.

Secondly, Russell was more than an academic philosopher, he was a public figure who was more well known than his philosophy. His life was lived in the pages of the press and made great fodder for the newshounds. Whether it was his many love affairs (including a disastrous one with poet T.S. Eliot's unstable wife Vivian) or his peace campaign during the first World War that led to his jailing by the English government, Russell always made good copy. Monk takes the reader behind the headlines to the events and forces that shaped the young Russell's life and philosophy. His partnership with Alfred North Whitehead in the co-authorship of Principia Mathematica is expertly handled, as is Russell's later dalliance with the Bloomsbury Group.

This is the first of two projected volumes and I can't wait to read Part Two.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Nightmare Beyond the Pythagorean Dream, January 2, 2001

By	Dennis E. Hamilton "orcmid" (Seattle, WA United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Russell: The Great Philosophers (The Great Philosophers Series) (Paperback)

This tiny book amazes me. Rather than attempt a biography, Monk focuses on one theme of Russell's life: his adventure with mathematics and the drive to reduce all of mathematics to logic, crystallized as a pristine whole of pure beauty -- the ultimate achievement of rational thought. Retracing the inspiration, successes, and ultimate defeat of that program, interpolating through the stages of Russell's own writings, Monk provides us with a glimpse of the integrity of a life committed to taking a major philosophical inquiry to an honest but unwanted and discouraging conclusion. In retracing the path of Russell's mathematical passion, Monk provides brief thumbnails of the major concepts that illuminated the route to today's mathematical logic and its foundational construction: one that in itself demonstrates the impossibility of a purely logical system that resolves all of mathematics as a wonder of deductive reasoning.