Tells the story of Jamaican “scammers” who use crime to gain autonomy, opportunity, and repair

There is romance in stealing from the rich to give to the poor, but how does that change when those perceived rich are elderly white North Americans and the poor are young Black Jamaicans? In this innovative ethnography, Jovan Scott Lewis tells the story of Omar, Junior, and Dwayne. Young and poor, they strive to make a living in Montego Bay, where call centers and tourism are the two main industries in the struggling economy. Their experience of grinding poverty and drastically limited opportunity leads them to conclude that scamming is the best means of gaining wealth and advancement. Otherwise, they are doomed to live in “sufferation”—an inescapable poverty that breeds misery, frustration, and vexation. 

In the Jamaican lottery scam run by these men, targets are told they have qualified for a large loan or award if they pay taxes or transfer fees. When the fees are paid, the award never arrives, netting the scammers tens of thousands of U.S. dollars. Through interviews, historical sources, song lyrics, and court testimonies, Lewis examines how these scammers justify their deceit, discovering an ethical narrative that reformulates ideas of crime and transgression and their relationship to race, justice, and debt. 

Scammer’s Yard describes how these young men, seeking to overcome inequality and achieve autonomy, come to view crime as a form of liberation. Their logic raises unsettling questions about a world economy that relegates postcolonial populations to deprivation even while expecting them to follow the rules of capitalism that exacerbate their dispossession. In this groundbreaking account, Lewis asks whether true reparation for the legacy of colonialism is to be found only through radical—even criminal—means.   

Many have told of the East India Company’s extraordinary excesses in eighteenth-century India, of the plunder that made its directors fabulously wealthy and able to buy British land and titles, but this is only a fraction of the story. When one of these men—Warren Hastings—was put on trial by Edmund Burke, it brought the Company’s exploits to the attention of the public. Through the trial and after, the British government transformed public understanding of the Company’s corrupt actions by creating an image of a vulnerable India that needed British assistance. Intrusive behavior was recast as a civilizing mission. In this fascinating, and devastating, account of the scandal that laid the foundation of the British Empire, Nicholas Dirks explains how this substitution of imperial authority for Company rule helped erase the dirty origins of empire and justify the British presence in India.

The Scandal of Empire reveals that the conquests and exploitations of the East India Company were critical to England’s development in the eighteenth century and beyond. We see how mercantile trade was inextricably linked with imperial venture and scandalous excess and how these three things provided the ideological basis for far-flung British expansion. In this powerfully written and trenchant critique, Dirks shows how the empire projected its own scandalous behavior onto India itself. By returning to the moment when the scandal of empire became acceptable we gain a new understanding of the modern culture of the colonizer and the colonized and the manifold implications for Britain, India, and the world.

Little work has been done to systematically analyze how high-profile incidents of child neglect and abuse shape child welfare policymaking in the United States. In Scandalous Politics, Juliet Gainsborough presents quantitative analysis of all fifty states and qualitative case studies of three states (Florida, Colorado, and New Jersey) that reveal how well-publicized child welfare scandals result in adoption of new legislation and new administrative procedures.

Gainsborough’s quantitative analysis suggests that child welfare policymaking is frequently reactive, while the case studies provide more detail about variations and the legislative process. For example, the case studies illustrate how the nature and extent of the policy response varies according to particular characteristics of the political environment in the state and the administrative structure of the child welfare system.

Scandalous Politics increases our understanding of the politics of child welfare at both the state and federal level and provides new insights into existing theories of agenda-setting and the policy process. It will be of interest to everyone involved with child welfare policymaking and especially public policy and public administration scholars.

An updated edition of the definitive history of Scandinavia over the past five centuries

Despite certain distinctions and differences, the lands of Scandinavia, or Norden—Sweden, Norway, Finland, Iceland, Denmark, and the Faroe Islands—are united by bonds of culture, language, and geography, and by a shared history that comes richly to life in this landmark work. Now in an expanded, updated edition, this authoritative chronicle of five centuries of Scandinavian history incorporates the geopolitical developments and momentous events that have marked the Nordic world in recent decades.

Scandinavia since 1500 situates the region’s political history within the traditional European chronology—in which the long “modern” period is subdivided into the Renaissance, early modern, modern, and contemporary. Within this framework, Byron J. Nordstrom traces the various ways in which economic, social, and cultural ideas and practices have come to Scandinavia from abroad, only to be modified and recast in a uniquely Nordic character. Long-unquestioned national mythologies come under Nordstrom's scrutiny, along with historical blind spots and erasures, as he ranges from canonical figures like Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden and Christian IV of Denmark to the constitutions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the resistance movements in World War II, and the Scandinavian welfare states, literary culture, and modern design. Expanded to include the nature and realities of the increasingly postindustrial economies of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries—including environmental concerns, integration with Europe, globalization, and immigration—Scandinavia since 1500 offers a comprehensive yet nuanced portrait of this unique region in all its political, diplomatic, social, economic, and cultural complexity.

Cover alt text: Bold white title and author name across breathtaking snowy landscape of sun-touched cliffs beside a waterway and scattering of homes.

Traditional Scandinavian home cooking—now in paperback!

Beatrice Ojakangas brings to life the cuisines and customs of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Denmark, countries that share borders and bounty. Danes lead with smørrebrød (an open-faced sandwich), which may be topped with cheese, green pepper, and sliced fresh strawberries. Finns specialize in earthy, chewy whole grain bread. Norwegians have wonderfully fresh fish and seafood, and the Swedes gave the world smörgåsbord!

A sweeping intellectual history of the concept of economic scarcity—its development across five hundred years of European thought and its decisive role in fostering the climate crisis.

Modern economics presumes a particular view of scarcity, in which human beings are innately possessed of infinite desires and society must therefore facilitate endless growth and consumption irrespective of nature’s limits. Yet as Fredrik Albritton Jonsson and Carl Wennerlind show, this vision of scarcity is historically novel and was not inevitable even in the age of capitalism. Rather, it reflects the costly triumph of infinite-growth ideologies across centuries of European economic thought—at the expense of traditions that sought to live within nature’s constraints.

The dominant conception of scarcity today holds that, rather than master our desires, humans must master nature to meet those desires. Albritton Jonsson and Wennerlind argue that this idea was developed by thinkers such as Francis Bacon, Samuel Hartlib, Alfred Marshall, and Paul Samuelson, who laid the groundwork for today’s hegemonic politics of growth. Yet proponents of infinite growth have long faced resistance from agrarian radicals, romantic poets, revolutionary socialists, ecofeminists, and others. These critics—including the likes of Gerrard Winstanley, Dorothy Wordsworth, Karl Marx, and Hannah Arendt—embraced conceptions of scarcity in which our desires, rather than nature, must be mastered to achieve the social good. In so doing, they dramatically reenvisioned how humans might interact with both nature and the economy.

Following these conflicts into the twenty-first century, Albritton Jonsson and Wennerlind insist that we need new, sustainable models of economic thinking to address the climate crisis. Scarcity is not only a critique of infinite growth, but also a timely invitation to imagine alternative ways of flourishing on Earth.

No American metropolis has intervened in its housing market quite as aggressively as New York since World War II—and yet none is as burdened by the scarcity, poor quality, uneven distribution, and high cost of its rental housing stock. Why, after half a century of rent control, public housing programs, tax abatement, and land use regulation, is it so difficult for thousands of New Yorkers to find, rent, and maintain decent apartments?

Addressing issues that are hotly debated in the Big Apple and other cities across the nation, Peter Salins and Gerard Mildner analyze New York's policies and assess their largely detrimental effects on housing quality and availability. They show how programs that were instituted for the benefit of both investors and the poor—by directly and indirectly subsidizing housing construction and by capping rents—have instead caused misallocation of housing, exacerbated tensions between tenants and landlords, progressively stifled private investment, and resulted in building deterioration and abandonment.

Scarcity by Design is an object lesson in what governments should not do if they wish to improve housing and maintain communities. It also makes a strong case for a highly controversial solution: arguing from a free-market perspective, Salins and Mildner clearly demonstrate how transition to a fully deregulated and subsidized housing market would alleviate the social and economic woes of New York's tenants. They present deregulation as the essential stimulus of housing production, fair pricing, and good maintenance. The authors' crisply written analysis of New York's housing problems and their proposed solutions will enlighten citizens, city managers, investors, builders, and urban planners, and should spark discussions in academic as well as professional circles.

The Scarecrow is the final volume of Ibrahim al-Koni’s Oasis trilogy, which chronicles the founding, flourishing, and decline of a Saharan oasis. Fittingly, this continuation of a tale of greed and corruption opens with a meeting of the conspirators who assassinated the community’s leader at the end of the previous novel, The Puppet. They punished him for opposing the use of gold in business transactions—a symptom of a critical break with their nomadic past—and now they must search for a leader who shares their fetishistic love of gold. A desert retreat inspires the group to select a leader at random, but their “choice,” it appears, is not entirely human. This interloper from the spirit world proves a self-righteous despot, whose intolerance of humanity presages disaster for an oasis besieged by an international alliance. Though al-Koni has repeatedly stressed that he is not a political author, readers may see parallels not only to a former Libyan ruler but to other tyrants—past and present—who appear as hollow as a scarecrow.

Visit the project's website at http://scarletandblack.rutgers.edu

 

Hawthorne’s greatest romance, The Scarlet Letter, is often simplistically seen as a timeless tale of desire, sin, and redemption. In his introduction, Michael J. Colacurcio argues that The Scarlet Letter is a serious historical novel. If Hawthorne’s fiction rigorously and faithfully subjects Hester and Dimmesdale to the limits of seventeenth-century possibility, it nonetheless looks forward to the better, brighter world of Margaret Fuller and Fanny Fern, of Charles Fourier and John Humphrey Noyes.

The John Harvard Library edition reproduces the authoritative text of The Scarlet Letter in the Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne.

An authoritative guide to modelmaking for theater

This third edition of noted scenographer Darwin Reid Payne’s landmark text builds upon Payne’s theories and exercises to provide a modern exploration of the practice of theatrical modelmaking. With chapters on traditional and contemporary materials, tools, and techniques, the book serves as a foundational guide to understanding the historical, theoretical, and practical aspects of scenographic modelmaking, making it essential for the beginner, generalist, and professional design practitioner.

The volume begins with a brief history of the scenographic model and explores how modelmaking has adapted to changes in materials, technology, and commercial influences over time. It details setting up a safe, productive model-building studio before introducing the types and purposes of various scenographic models. It then instructs the reader in constructing common model elements and accessories. Later chapters explore how the models reveal stage space and create mood and atmosphere through tonal shading and lighting; discuss the use of found objects, collage techniques, and projection models in scenic design; and delve into 3D printing and computer routering. The final chapter provides information on various aspects of photography and image sharing related to design and production communication.

This comprehensive text provides information not just from theater but also from other modeling disciplines and sources, including architecture, film, dioramas, dollhouse modeling, and model railroading. A useful resource for high school, community college, university, and community theater enthusiasts, it is an excellent reference book for theater designers throughout the country.

Scheming for the Poor is the first comparative analysis of redistributive policymaking in Latin America. William Ascher examines the success or failure of progressive policies launched by nine governments grouped into three regime types—populist, reformist, and radical—over the course of the postwar history of Argentina, Chile, and Peru.

His findings challenge the conventional views that redistribution in Latin America is either doomed to failure or else is the inevitable consequence of a balance of pro-redistributive and anti-redistributive forces. Ascher shows that tactics and careful attention to practical politics and policy implementation are far more important than regime type and professed political objectives and credos. The adept policymakers—from the Argentine authoritarian populist Juan Perón to the Chilean reformist Eduardo Frei—delivered more as redistributionists than did the economic romantics.

Integrating the political and economic aspects of redistribution, Ascher shows that in political terms success stems from subtlety rather than stridency, perceptions rather than economic realities, the astute formation of coalitions, and aversion of the mobilization of the opposition. Ultimately, of course, economic pressures impose a limit on what is politically possible, and Ascher demonstrates how economic requirements constrain the politics of income redistribution.

Schizophrenia: Science and Practice brings together the work of many of today's most distinguished authorities in psychiatry. From diverse perspectives, these specialists review what is presently known—and unknown—about schizophrenia. The conceptual underpinnings of the diagnosis of schizophrenic illness, recent elaborations of psychosocial and developmental theories, current genetic and biochemical research, and traditional as well as newer treatment approaches are among the topics discussed in this unusually clear and lively account.

How effective are contemporary psychotherapeutic approaches to schizophrenia? What drug therapies are being used or proposed, and why? What about the treatment milieu and the difficult strategic questions surrounding the recent movement toward the “deinstitutionalization” of schizophrenic patients? Ultimately, should schizophrenia be defined as a toxic illness or as a way of life? In attempting to answer these and other questions, Dr. Shershow is joined by contributors Irwin Savodnik, Seymour Kety, Theodore Udz, Gerald Klerman, Ian Creese, Solomon Snyder, Leo Hollister, Jonathan Borus, Daniel Schwartz, and Loren Mosher, among others.

All the issues confronting psychiatry as a self-conscious discipline within contemporary medicine converge on the problem of schizophrenia. The important hope Schizophrenia: Science and Practice raises is that a fruitful pluralism among the variety of approaches to schizophrehia, and to psychiatric problems in general, can be sustained.

1. Taking Your Program to the Next Level
2. Open Educational Resources
3. Publishing Models and Open Access
4. Tools, Trends, and Best Practices for Modern Researchers 

A powerful and original argument that the practice of scholarship is grounded in the concept of radical freedom, beginning with the freedoms of inquiry, thought, and expression.

Why are scholars and scholarship invariably distrusted and attacked by authoritarian regimes? Geoffrey Galt Harpham argues that at its core, scholarship is informed by an emancipatory agenda based on a permanent openness to the new, an unlimited responsiveness to evidence, and a commitment to conversion. At the same time, however, scholarship involves its own forms of authority. As a worldly practice, it is a struggle for dominance without end as scholars try to disprove the claims of others, establish new versions of the truth, and seek disciples.

Scholarship and Freedom threads its general arguments through examinations of the careers of three scholars: W. E. B. Du Bois, who serves as an example of scholarly character formation; South African Bernard Lategan, whose New Testament studies became entangled on both sides of his country’s battles over apartheid; and Linda Nochlin, whose essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” virtually created the field of feminist art history.

A decade ago in the Times Literary Supplement, Roderick Conway Morris claimed that “almost everything that was going to happen in book publishing—from pocket books, instant books and pirated books, to the concept of author’s copyright, company mergers, and remainders—occurred during the early days of printing.” Ian Maclean’s colorful survey of the flourishing learned book trade of the late Renaissance brings this assertion to life.

The story he tells covers most of Europe, with Frankfurt and its Fair as the hub of intellectual exchanges among scholars and of commercial dealings among publishers. The three major religious confessions jostled for position there, and this rivalry affected nearly all aspects of learning. Few scholars were exempt from religious or financial pressures. Maclean’s chosen example is the literary agent and representative of international Calvinism, Melchior Goldast von Haiminsfeld, whose activities included opportunistic involvement in the political disputes of the day. Maclean surveys the predicament of underfunded authors, the activities of greedy publishing entrepreneurs, the fitful interventions of regimes of censorship and licensing, and the struggles faced by sellers and buyers to achieve their ends in an increasingly overheated market.

The story ends with an account of the dramatic decline of the scholarly book trade in the 1620s, and the connivance of humanist scholars in the values of the commercial world through which they aspired to international recognition. Their fate invites comparison with today’s writers of learned books, as they too come to terms with new technologies and changing academic environments.

Both an exorcism of contemporary academia and a comedic portrait of an artist seeking the means to survive.
 
At once angry and jubilant, Ray Levy’s School is a curse on a dying system and an incantation for transforming pain into a vessel for capacious, creative selfhood.

A dissertation manuscript possessed by the spirit of Marquis de Sade; a lecture on psychoanalysis delivered as stand-up comedy by a dysphoric graduate student; a review of a found-footage horror movie that’s also a YouTube video of a conference presentation on French theory; an interview with an avant-garde filmmaker that’s really an invocation for conjuring your demon brother; oversharing and withholding, chanting and channeling, School is a slapstick roast of Derrida’s corpse and a mystical vision of a life in which you have not lost.

If there is a "culture war" taking place in the United States, one of the most interesting, if under-the-radar, battlegrounds is in local school board elections. Rarely does the pitch of this battle reach national attention, as it did in Kansas when the state school board—led by several outspoken conservative Christians—voted to delete evolution from the state's science curriculum and its standardized tests in August 1999. That action rattled not only the educational and scientific communities, but concerned citizens around the nation as well.

While the movement of the Christian Right into national and state politics has been well documented, this is the first book to examine their impact on local school board politics. While the Kansas decision was short-lived, during the past decade in school districts around the country, conservative Christian majorities have voted to place limits on sex education, to restrict library books, to remove references to gays and lesbians in the classroom, and to promote American culture as superior to other cultures.

School Board Battles studies the motivation, strategies, and electoral success of Christian Right school board candidates. Based on interviews, and using an extensive national survey of candidates as well as case studies of two school districts in which conservative Christians ran and served on local boards, Melissa M. Deckman gives us a surprisingly complex picture of these candidates. She reveals weaker ties to national Christian Right organizations—and more similarities between these conservative candidates and their more secular counterparts than might be expected.

Deckman examines important questions: Why do conservative Christians run for school boards? How much influence has the Christian Right actually had on school boards? How do conservative Christians govern? School Board Battles is an in-depth and in-the-trenches look at an important encounter in the "culture war"—one that may well determine the future of our nation's youth.

Educational policy in a democracy goes beyond teaching literacy and numeracy. It also supports teaching moral reasoning, political tolerance, respect for diversity, and citizenship. Education policy should encourage liberty and equality of opportunity, hold educational institutions accountable, and be efficient. School Choice Tradeoffs examines the tradeoffs among these goals when government affords parents the means to select the schools their children attend.

Godwin and Kemerer compare current policy that uses family residence to assign students to schools with alternative policies that range from expanding public choice options to school vouchers. They identify the benefits and costs of each policy approach through a review of past empirical literature, the presentation of new empirical work, and legal and philosophic analysis.

The authors offer a balanced perspective that goes beyond rhetoric and ideology to offer policymakers and the public insight into the complex tradeoffs that are inherent in the design and implementation of school choice policies. While all policies create winners and losers, the key questions concern who these individuals are and how much they gain or lose. By placing school choice within a broader context, this book will stimulate reflective thought in all readers.

Schools should be safe—but they are not always safe for everybody. Authors Pamela Wilcox, Graham Ousey, and Marie Skubak Tillyer studied crime among students located across diverse middle- and high-school settings to investigate why some students engage in delinquency—but others do not—and why some students are more prone to victimization. School Zone focuses on the three key interactional elements—context, victims, and offenders—to understand and explain the impact of common crimes such as theft, weapon carrying, drug possession and the verbal, physical, and sexual harassment of classmates. 

The authors also consider how individual students and schools respond to crime and threats. They analyze the variables that schools can control in planning and practice that explain why some schools have higher crime rates. School Zone uses empirical studies to provide a comprehensive understanding of the patterns and causes of variation in individual- and aggregate-level school-based offending and victimization experiences while also addressing the adequacy of wide-ranging criminological explanations and crime prevention policies. 

In their conclusion, the authors assess the extent to which currently popular strategies of school crime prevention align with what they have discovered through their problem-analysis framework and scientific understandings of student offending and victimization.

How should we educate the children of tomorrow to solve the problems of today?

A new educational model is generating widespread interest and excitement among educators, parents, and community leaders. Known as "cognitive apprenticeship", the model draws upon contemporary cognitive and developmental science and specifies techniques for capitalizing on children's inborn ability to learn in complex natural settings. Sylvia Farnham-Diggory reports on a wide range of school programs that illustrate this innovative approach to schooling.

The new approach contrasts sharply with much current school practice, which is based on early twentieth-century theories of learning. These early theories, in misguided attempts to be "scientific", defined the acquisition of knowledge in terms of simple, quantifiable test behaviors. School practice derived from such outdated theory continues to revolve around fragmented lessons that can be easily counted and graded.

New research in cognition and human development shows that the acquisition of knowledge must be defined in terms of complex interactive networks. It cannot be acquired from workbooks or ditto sheets, nor can it be assessed through paper-and-pencil tests. Mastery of basic skills, a delight in history, literature, and science, and a creative approach to problem solving are best encouraged when children have opportunities to work alongside experts in meaningful and important contexts, thus participating in cognitive apprenticeships.

While never losing sight of her theoretical framework, Farnham-Diggory offers many practical suggestions for transforming classrooms into places of genuine intellectual growth. Schooling sets out a creative and realistic agenda for parents, teachers, school administrators, business leaders, and other concerned citizens who are looking for ways to replace traditional 1930s-style classrooms with rigorous and exciting educational environments.

Jennifer Rycenga recovers a pioneering example of antiracism and Black-white cooperation. At once an inspirational and cautionary tale, Canterbury Academy succeeded thanks to far-reaching networks, alliances, and activism that placed it within Black, women’s, and abolitionist history. Rycenga focuses on the people like Sarah Harris, the Academy’s first Black student; Maria Davis, Crandall’s Black housekeeper and her early connection to the embryonic abolitionist movement; and Crandall herself. Telling their stories, she highlights the agency of Black and white women within the currents, and as a force changing those currents, in nineteenth-century America.

Insightful and provocative, Schooling the Nation tells the forgotten story of remarkable women and a collaboration across racial and gender lines.

Considers colonial school–prison systems in relation to the self-determination of Native communities, nations, and peoples

The School–Prison Trust describes interrelated histories, ongoing ideologies, and contemporary expressions of what the authors call the “school–prison trust”: a conquest strategy encompassing the boarding school and juvenile prison models, and deployed in the long war against Native peoples. At its heart, the book is a constellation of stories of Indigenous self-determination in the face of this ongoing conquest.

Following the stories of an incarcerated young man named Jakes, the authors consider features of school–prison relations for young Native people to ask urgent questions about Indigenous sovereignty, conquest, survivance, and refusal.

For most of the history of the United States, citizens and elected officials alike considered elementary and secondary education to be the quintessential state and local function. Only in the past four decades, from Lyndon B. Johnson's signing of the landmark Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 to George W. Bush's ambitious but controversial "No Child Left Behind" initiative, has Washington's influence over America's schools increased significantly. Today, many Americans have become more convinced that the U.S. government and the states should play an increasingly important role in the nation's schools.

In School's In, Paul Manna looks over forty years of national education policymaking and asserts that although Washington's influence over American schools has indeed increased, we should neither overestimate the expansion of federal power nor underestimate the resiliency and continuing influence of the states. States are developing comprehensive—often innovative—education policies, and a wide array of educational issues have appeared on the political agenda at the state and national levels.

Manna believes that this overlap is no accident. At the core of his argument is the idea of "borrowing strength," a process by which policy entrepreneurs at one level of government attempt to push their agendas by leveraging the capabilities possessed by other governments in the federal system. Our nation's education agenda, he says, has taken shape through the interaction of policy makers at national and state levels who borrow strength from each other to develop and enact educational reforms.

Based on analyses of public laws, presidential speeches, congressional testimony, public opinion, political advertising, and personal interviews, School's In draws on concepts of federalism and agenda-setting to offer an original view of the growing federal role in education policy. It provides insights not only about how education agendas have changed and will likely unfold in the future, but also about the very nature of federalism in the United States.

This richly researched and impressively argued work is a history of public schooling in Alabama in the half century following the Civil War. It engages with depth and sophistication Alabama’s social and cultural life in the period that can be characterized by the three “R”s: Reconstruction, redemption, and racism. Alabama was a mostly rural, relatively poor, and culturally conservative state, and its schools reflected the assumptions of that society.

This richly detailed biography of a key figure in nineteenth-century philosophy pays equal attention to the life and to the work of Arthur Schopenhauer. Rüdiger Safranski places this visionary skeptic in the context of his philosophical predecessors and contemporaries Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel—and explores the sources of his profound alienation from their “secularized religion of reason.” He also provides a narrative of Schopenhauer’s personal and family life that reads like a Romantic novel: the struggle to break free from a domineering father, the attempt to come to terms with his mother’s literary and social success (she was a well-known writer and a member of Goethe’s Weimar circle), the loneliness and despair when his major philosophical work, The World as Will and Representation, was ignored by the academy. Along the way Safranski portrays the rich culture of Goethe’s Weimar, Hegel’s Berlin, and other centers of German literary and intellectual life.

When Schopenhauer first proposed his philosophy of “weeping and gnashing of teeth,” during the heady “wild years” of Romantic idealism, it found few followers. After the disillusionments and failures of 1848, his work was rediscovered by philosophers and literary figures. Writers from Nietzsche to Samuel Beckett have responded to Schopenhauer’s refusal to seek salvation through history.

The first biography of Schopenhauer to appear in English in this century, Schopenhauer and the Wild Years of Philosophy succeeds in bringing to life an intriguing figure in philosophy and the intellectual battles of his time, whose consequences still shape our world.