Repugnant
This is a horrible book, poorly written because it's unnecessarily and excessively academic and abstract, hypocritical because it values political correctness while preaching against it, and it contains far less factual information about the main subject, Otto Weininger, than is found on Wikipedia or any other research article on the Internet -- while spraying whole chapters with a lot of distracting and irrelevant information concerning turn-of-the-century Vienna, concerning an early pioneer of feminism named Rosa Mayreder, and the standard semitic bromides concerning the Jewish question.
The reader will literally learn nothing about Otto Weininger's infamous suicide, and he or she will not even learn that Otto Weininger was equally infamously a homosexual. As well, the reader will learn only a couple of ideas from Otto Weininger's famous work, "Sex and Character," the presentation of which the author interlaces with gaseous vagaries concerning Kant and Freud.
For this author, it is not possible that Otto Weininger was a self-hating Jewish homosexual while offering literally no proof as to why his writing and his death prove to be otherwise.
The author does provide provocative references to Ibsen's "Peer Gynt" as one source for Otto Weininger's ideas as well as to Tolstoy's "The Kreutzer Sonata," and he also indicates, however shallowly, that Weininger influenced James Joyce's "Ulysses," Gertrude Stein's "The Making of Americans" and Strindberg's play "Miss Julia." Such references are valuable and not easily found on the Internet or Wikipedia, but this short book is so bloated with sociological assumptions and "official narratives" passing for historical facts and blatantly bad writing -- with little factual content -- it's not worth reading let alone purchasing.
How does an academic professor get away with writing this garbage, for instance? On page 69: "His claim is that men can distinguish henids from their emotional backdrop, whereas women are not." The parallel structure of that sentence is whacked and incomprehensible. On page 139, "In the end, what we do is far more important than what we think or say about what we. This essay is directed towards re-focussing upon that Weininger message. . . " What we?
The author makes decisive and conclusive remarks about Otto Weininger and his work with the scurrilous use of the word "seems." The author wants to impress the reader of his having acribically (his word -- meticulously and painstakingly) gone over all the relevant material in order to refurbish Otto Weininger's ideas, work, and reputation -- without, in reality, having done anything of the sort, just spraying the white pages of this little book with opinion, assumptions, unsupported or weakly supported claims, and semitic propaganda.
This shameful, tawdry piece of verbal gas and chutzpah, 150 pages long, the factual content of which can easily be summarized in a two-page pamphlet, was a repellent experience of reading and is a repugnant (and inadequate) example of what passes for ethically sound, academic reasoning and research.
