Description: In an absorbing narrative about personalities and social history, Menand discusses the Metaphysical Club, an informal group that met in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1872, to talk about ideas. Members included Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., William James, and Charles Sanders Peirce. 21 photos.
Brief description: Louis Menand is professor of English at Harvard University and a staff writer at The New Yorker. His books include The Free World and The Metaphysical Club, which won the Pulitzer Prize in history and the Francis Parkman Prize from the Society of American Historians. In 2016, he was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama.
Review Quotes: "The Metaphysical Club is dramatic and persuasive ... something very like a history of the American mind at work." --Alan Ryan, The New York Review of Books