Friedrich Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography
*Starred Review* I am the most terrible dynamite there is. So wrote Nietzsche in 1888. Young chronicles the improbable story of how a fastidious professor of Greek philology became the most explosive intellectual force in Europe. To be sure, readers will likely already know how this self-styled Antichrist waged war on Christianity to create cultural space for a boldly heroic egoism. They may not realize, though, that Nietzsche was not merely emancipating a few supermen from the Christian religion; rather, he was inviting the entire community to embrace a naturalistic new religion of human-glorifying arts. But nothing will surprise readers more than Young's conclusion that Nietzsche abandoned his famous (and posthumously published) work on the will to power because he had lost faith in its daring thesis. In elucidating such complexities, Young challenges those who have tarred Nietzsche as a proto-Nazi, documenting his hatred for anti-Semitism and militarism. Still, readers must confront Nietzsche's unsavory advocacy of eugenics and his strident opposition to feminism (despite close friendships with many feminists). But nothing will make Nietzsche's admirers squirm more than Young's interpretation of the iconoclast's final mental breakdown as the natural culmination of a lifetime of ecstatic philosophizing with a hammer. A biography as profound and disturbing as its subject. --Bryce Christensen