[.ca] Emerson: The Mind on Fire (ISBN 0520206894)

Outstanding:
It's hard to believe that this biography of Emerson can be topped. It's dense - but truly gives the ins and outs of Emerson's life, his passions, relationships and what influenced his thought...even his reading lists...it was a pleasure to read such fine scholarship....

Outstanding biography of America's first literary giant:
I must confess that I don't understand the reader review below who found this biography of Emerson to be a difficult read. Although not quite a page-turner, I managed to read this in very little time at all. I must also confess that I do find Emerson himself incredibly difficult to read. But what I find to be the case in Emerson himself, I did not find to be true in Richardson's biography. While I find that Emerson constructed one stunning sentence and aphorism after another, I generally find his essays to be slow going. Nonetheless, while I am not his biggest fan, he is unquestionably one of the four or five greatest figures in American intellectual history, and Richardson's biography does him great justice. The great merit of this biography is that at the end of it, you feel that you have gained considerable insight both into Emerson and New England intellectual life in the 19th century. I was especially intrigued with Richardson detailing of Emerson's reading. Emerson was, without any question, a great reader. Great readers rarely read books from cover to cover. Samuel Johnson, who was himself one of the most accomplished readers in the history of civilization, once said that we have more of a need to reread than to read. But he also once quipped, "What, you read books all the way to the end?" Emerson did not read books all the way to the end. But like Johnson and other great readers, he had a genius for picking out the most important points. What Boswell wrote of Johnson is true also of Emerson: "He had a peculiar facility in seizing at once what was valuable in any book, without submitting to the labour of perusing it from beginning to end." One comes away from the book also enormously impressed with Emerson's character. He seems by any standard to have been a remarkably good human being. He was both a man of high principle, and a man of powerful attachments to other human beings. I found the accounting of his various friendships, many to equally famous individuals, to be of the utmost interest. Also, he seems to have met virtually every important thinker and writer in the English-speaking world, from Coleridge to Carlyle to Melville. I heartily recommend this book to anyone who wants to gain a deeper knowledge of Emerson's life and work. By any standard, Emerson is one of the giants in American life. His influence on American thought is incalculable. Consider: not only was he the major influence on such American literary figures the magnitude of Thoreau and Whitman; he was a profound influence on artists such as Thomas Cole, Moran, and Bierstadt. America's deep-rooted environmentalism is steeped in Emersonian Transcendentalism. John Muir was a devoted reader of Emerson. One could make a case for Emerson having had perhaps more influence in the shaping of American thought than any other individual. This biography is an outstanding introduction to that person.

The Best of the Best:
Robert Richardson's biography of Emerson is superb. Though, as Richardson reminds us, Emerson did not like superlative language when precise and adequate language would do, it is the case that at times the superlative, the precise and the adequate converge (as, in fact, they often did in Emerson's writings). Richardson's biography is indeed superb in its unfolding of Emerson's life -- the loves, the friendships, the losses, the intellectual and spiritual hunger, the religious quest, the writers in America, in Europe, in Persia and elsewhere to whom Emerson owed and acknowledged debts, the grasping at and for a world, the determination of a single, brilliant human being to find his way and to see his life, and all individual lives, as imbued with the divine and thus worth living. The book is also superbly written. Each short chapter offers enough substantive insight to urge the reader into the next. It is a long book, but not long-winded. Richardson provides the reader with some morsel of insight in a few pages of narrative, and then offers a rest to digest what has been said. His placement of quotations from Emerson's journals, essays and other works is brilliant, offering the reader a useful sketch of Emerson's metaphysics and ethics. In my own case, this has allowed time to reach for other literature more fully descriptive of the events or scenes offered in a particular chapter, or to reread chunks of Emerson's writings while moving through the biography. The book is a useful tool not merely for a study of Emerson's life but for a study of Transcendentalism and of the interplay of ideas across the Atlantic that shaped American thought in so many ways. One sees more clearly where and how such writers as Nietzsche and Thoreau obtained the seeds of their own truths from Emerson's works and thoughts. Richardson has set the standard for the writing of future biographies. Again, simply superb.

Difficult read:
I had a very hard time plowing through this book. Tried to read through it 2-3 times, and found it difficult. I don't have a background in philosophy, but I do have two doctorate degrees, and this book gave me a headache. There are too many long lists of titles that mean nothing to me, as well as too many diversions to explain the life and thought of all the men and women Emerson met in a lifetime. I felt that the author could have pared down the information a bit more. There were clearly some details that diverted like the fact that Waldo's brother got paid for writing another student's essays and then the students got together to see if it was a good deal or not. What does this tell us about Waldo? I enjoyed learning about Emerson's life but felt like it required more effort than it should have.

A revelation of the man.:
Once I started reading this book I could not stop for very long. It was so good I did not want it to end. This book traces Emerson's intellectual and spiritual path in such great detail that it enables the reader to further investigate Emerson's sources if he or she so chooses. The biographical information was quite complete as well. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in Emerson or Transcendentalism. I noticed that Richardson has also written a biography of Thoreau and I will likely read it. This book represents a very high degree of scholarship and a great effort on the part of the author. I also greatly appreciated the photos of Emerson and the people close to him. Personally, I would have liked to have seen a few more photos of his second wife and his children. I would have also liked to have learned how his wife managed after Emerson died and perhaps some information regarding his descendants. However, these are my own personal preferences and are in no way meant to diminish the excellence of this book. The material is well structured into about 100 brief chapters which I thought made the reading easy. I never felt bogged down due to the length of the book. This is not a short book. I really came away from the book with a sense of the man and an appreciation of the events and societal pressures of his time. After reading this book I think anyone familiar with Emerson's writings would feel like sitting down with the man to have a discussion to clear up a point or two.