Book description
Claude Levi-Strauss, the 'father of modern anthropology' and author of
the classic Tristes tropiques, was one of the most influential
intellectuals of the second half of the twentieth century. Dislodging
Sartre, Camus and de Beauvoir from the pinnacle of French intellectual
life in the 1950s, he brought about a sea change in Western thought and
inspired a generation of thinkers and writers, including Michel
Foucault, Roland Barthes and Jacques Lacan with his structuralist
theories. Levi-Strauss's bohemian childhood and later studies of the
emerging discipline of anthropology in the field and the university led
him to mix with intellectuals, artists and poets from all over Europe.
Tracing the evolution of his ideas through interviews with the man
himself, research into his archives and conversations with contemporary
anthropologists, Wilcken explores and explains Levi-Strauss's theories,
revealing an artiste manque who infused his academic writing with an
artistic and poetic sensibility. 'An intellectual biography that
briskly and brilliantly assesses the great, original, creative ideas and
their origins in the context of Levi-Strauss's life from the 1930s to
the 1960s in Brazil, New York and Paris' The Times Biographies of the
Year 'Both a gratifyingly clear summary of a difficult body of work and
a eulogy for a time "when the stream of consciousness of one mind
could leave a deep cultural imprint"' New Yorker 'Illuminating ...
This book, with an admiring but not slavish appreciation of its subject
... appreciates and communicates the grandeur of its subject's
accomplishments' New York Times '[Wilcken] lays out the life with
clarity, efficiency, readability and occasionally dissent ... A superbly
thrilling life' Guardian Patrick Wilcken grew up in Sydney and studied
at Goldsmiths College and the Institute of Latin American Studies in
London. He has contributed Brazil-related reviews and features to the
Times Literary Supplement and the Guardian. He is the author of Empire
Adrift: He has spent lengthy periods in Rio de Janeiro and now lives in
London, with his wife and child.
