Nietzsche in 90 Minutes - by Paul Strathern

Strathern, a graduate of Dublin's Trinity College, has lectured in philosophy and mathematics and

written history, travel literature, and fiction. His attempt to provide the reader with

accessible guidance to the ideas of a half dozen great names in the canon of Western philosophy

fails on all counts except readability. The time given in the title for each presentation is

about three times that even the least-informed reader might require, for these books are nothing

but outlines. Half of each volume highlights the more peculiar details of the individual

philosopher's personal life, with passing remarks about one or two substantive ideas from his

work. The remaining pages include surprisingly brief quotations from the works (an epigraphic

style suitable to presenting a sample of Nietzsche's writing but hardly appropriate to Kant's),

chronologies (including one five-page "Philosophical Dates" that is repeated in each tiny

volume), and a suggestion of four or five books for further reading. The intended audience for

this series is unclear as there is too little substance to provide either the sort of

introduction offered by such competing works as the Writers and Readers's illustrated series "For

Beginners" (e.g., Robert Cavalier's Plato for Beginners, 1990) or critical understanding of

difficult concepts as Frederick Copleston and William Jones have achieved in their histories of

Western thought (e.g., Copleston's A History of Philosophy, 1985). Strathern's publisher promises

more than a dozen future volumes in this series but, given the severe limitations of the first

six under review here, it is not possible to recommend that we look forward to them.?Francisca

Goldsmith, Berkeley P.L., Cal.