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“Excellent book covering the life of the noted philosopher, mathematician and peace campaigner. He lived nearly a century and was active into old age. Born a Victorian, he drank with Gladstone, campaigned for Women's Suffrage, was imprisoned for opposing the WW1, achieved a measure of respectability after reluctantly accepting the necessity of WW2, was imprisoned again for campaigning against nuclear weapons, and his penultimate book was an expose of the Vietnam War.
TheophileEscargot wrote this review Monday, June 8 2009. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
Always willing to communicate at a layman's level, the book doesn't go into any great detail on mathematics, logic or epistemology; just describing. his emotions and motivations. He talks with a degree of frankness about his marriages, but doesn't go into much detail on his alleged affairs: the picture that emerges today is of rather mundane serial monogamy.
Compared to his other works, the autobiography is particularly fascinating on two counts. Firstly he had a lot of contact with the other famous people of his lifetime, so you get glimpses of Keynes, Wittgenstein, Joseph Conrad, Einstein, T.S. Eliot and others.
Secondly you get to see the evolution of his thought. I think one of the things that made his creative live so long and significant that he was willing to change his mind. He started off as a kind of arch-idealist trying to find a firm foundation for mathematics: when he proved that impossible he ended up an arch empiricist.
He describes how one of the things that made him moderate his pacifism was running an experimental school, where he found it necessary to exert authority to stop the strong oppressing the weak.
Definitely well worth reading, though I skimmed over some of the letters which end each chapter. You're better off reading some of his other works first though, as the autobiography fits things together.”
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