Jacques Barzun: Portrait of a Mind is the first book to recount the career and ideas of one of the twentieth century's leading intellectuals. Still writing at age 103 in his current home, San Antonio, Texas, Barzun has ranged across subjects from baseball and detective fiction to cultural and educational histories. He exemplified one of his beliefs: a life of the mind should not be limited by narrow specialization. In the fifties, he was featured on the cover of TIME magazine under the tag line: America and the Intellectual ...
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Jacques Barzun: Portrait of a Mind is the first book to recount the career and ideas of one of the twentieth century's leading intellectuals. Still writing at age 103 in his current home, San Antonio, Texas, Barzun has ranged across subjects from baseball and detective fiction to cultural and educational histories. He exemplified one of his beliefs: a life of the mind should not be limited by narrow specialization. In the fifties, he was featured on the cover of TIME magazine under the tag line: America and the Intellectual. Jacques Barzun is the author of some thirty books of biography, history, and cultural criticism, among them the best sellers From Dawn to Decadence and The House of Intellect--the one an indictment of governmental and foundation interference with the autonomy of scholars and universities, the other an argument that the West was falling into decay and incapacity. He is the author of a definitive life and times--Berlioz and the Romantic Century--which helped to restore a maligned composer to his place in the front rank, and to reassess a creative period then widely considered corrupt. And he wrote a definitive biography (though not in the usual sense of the word) in his affectionate reminiscence of his intellectual mentor: A Stroll with William James. Barzun's influence was great but subtle, perhaps because of the range of his interests. Barzun was in print deploring the superstition of race, for example, in the early 1930s, and books followed that cast light on Marxism, on the putative gulf between science and the humanities, on teaching and learning in schools and colleges, and on the social importance of the life of the mind. Science: The Glorious Entertainment was one such book, as were Teacher in America and Darwin, Marx, Wagner: Critique of a Heritage. Jacques Barzun: Portrait of a Mind describes Barzun's career and ideas, and, insofar as pertinent to his thought, his work at Columbia University and as literary adviser to Charles Scribner's Sons, his marriage into the Boston Lowells, and his relation with the New York Intellectuals.
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