Book Description
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 the emergence of a unique
temperament--serene, comic, secular, and unafraid--and he
examines its influence on Berlin's vision of liberalism,
which stressed the often tragic nature of political and moral
choice. A magisterial book, illuminating and beautifully
written, Isaiah Berlin will stand with the great modern
biographies.
About the Author
Michael Ignatieff is a regular contributer to The New
Yorker and The New York Review of Books. He is the author of
The Warrior's Honor (see Owl catalog, page 32), The Russian
Album (winner of the Governor General's Award), The Needs of
Strangers, and Scar Tissue, a novel shortlisted for the
Booker Prize.
