The World As I Found It - 9781590173602

Vienna, 1900. The trenches of World War I and the dark slide into Nazi Europe. The intellectual lights of Cambridge University and the nabobs on the outskirts of Bloomsbury. Marriage and domestic life. These are just a few of the worlds the reader enters in this exhilarating novel of ideas, romance, and imagination. Irreverently trespassing on the turf of history, biography, and philosophy, The World as I Found It is the tale of three wildly different men adrift in the twentieth century. At the center is Ludwig Wittgenstein, one of the most magnetic philosophers of our time: brilliant, tortured, mercurial, forging his own solitary path while leaving a permanent mark—and sometimes a scar—on lives all around him. Playing in counterpoint are Wittgenstein’s two reluctant mentors: Bertrand Russell, past his philosophical prime yet eager to break new ground as a public intellectual, educational theorist, and sexual adventurer; and G. E. Moore, the great Cambridge don who exercised such an influence on E. M. Forster and who was devoted to the pleasures of the table and pure thought until, late in life, he discovered real fulfillment in marriage and fatherhood. Rich in humor and tragedy, lust and violence, spirit and striving, this is a novel that will enthrall any reader.