An intellectual biography is rare on book shelves today. You find memoirs of Chelsea Handler and quickly written pop biographies of whoever is president at the time. Every once in a while, you come across an intellectual biography. It is not written like your "normal" biography; instead it is a biography of ideas, more specifically the ideas of the person whom the author is writing about. That is what Eric Miller has done for the social critic and historian Christopher Lasch. Miller is less concerned with the daily life of Christopher Lasch; instead he explores the ideas and works of Lasch. From his groundbreaking Narcissism to his final magnum opus Revolt of the Elites, we get an in-depth and close-up view of this monumental thinker. Shunned by the left, and embraced by the right (whom he ignored), he was a lonely scholar using history as a guide to critique modern America. This is a wonderfully written biography, and one that is not for the faint of heart. Many people might get lost in the authors argument; but it is well worth the read.
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