First of all, forget that "maelstrom." This is not some sort of cultural panorama of fin de siecle America, with William James as
Corybant or coryphaeus of a band of wild-eyed "modernists." (James died in 1910, the same year as Mark Twain, long before voices like Ezra Pound or Gertrude Stein or Hart Crane began to be heard.) Richardson, who has done solid biographies of Emerson and Thoreau, offers us a splendid full-length portrait of a thinker who in many ways was not a modernist (his lifelong attachment to religion, his conservative personal values, his indebtedness to John Stuart Mill and the utilitarian tradition), but whose lucidity, compassion, fairness, wit, and all-American gusto make him, nearly a century after his death, one our country's great father-figures.
However, Roger Crisp, of Oxford, displays a touch of the
corybant when he writes: "[Singer] has done an incalculable amount of good." And Dale Jamieson--a pint-sized Adonis with iron-gray lovelocks--whirls himself happily into the dance: "Singer is one of the most influential philosophers of this century ...