Reading the New Nietzsche - by David B Allison (Paperback)

About the Book

Reading the New Nietzsche is devoted to a comprehensive analysis of the four most important ad widely read of Nietzsche's works. After a largely biographical introduction, a chapter is devoted to each work. Read in succession they give an overall philosophical account of Nietzsche's thought.

Book Synopsis

Reading the New Nietzsche is devoted to a comprehensive analysis of the four most important ad widely read of Nietzsche's works. After a largely biographical introduction, a chapter is devoted to each work. Read in succession they give an overall philosophical account of Nietzsche's thought.

Review Quotes

David Allison enriches the reading of these key Nietzschean texts with helpful information and leads the reader to the philosophical issues at stake. His exposition is informed by the most sophisticated contemporary debates. First time as well as long time readers of Nietzsche will find they are discovering a Nietzsche writing for today.

David Allison, as much as anyone else, has helped to make the 'new Nietzsche' speak English; now he offers provocative and scintillating readings of four of the most significant and challenging texts of a thinker who is always renewing himself. Allison's mastery of the classical and humanistic background of Nietzsche's writing is impressive; his careful *and* daring interpretations respond imaginatively to the philosopher's invitation that reading be an adventure-like a dance and a song in the mountains. Amazingly, this is a book that will delight and instruct both the beginner and the scholar.

First time readers of Nietzsche will find these text-based readings valuable guides to the intricacies of Nietzsche's writing. Readers already familiar with Nietzsche's works will find the readings cogent and thoughtful. However, for novice and experienced readers alike, what is most valuable in Allison's text is the background information from the history of ideas and from Nietzsche's life the he brings to bear on his readings.

Had Nietzsche been aware that so many competing schools of interpretation would claim him for their own, he would doubtless have been flattered, after the almost complete neglect his writings had during his own lifetime. David Allison's book is the only one, however, he would have endorsed, as having gotten his philosophy down exactly as he would have wished, but hardly dared expect. The book is a masterpiece of exposition and analysis, presenting the work and the life through a brilliant reading of four of Nietzsche's great books. Nietzsche's enthusiasts can clear their shelves of the bickering secondary literature. This is the book to keep.

It is the peculiar (and maybe cruel) fate of Friedrich Nietzsche to have, a hundred years post facto, an audience that is wide yet uncomprehending. David Allison's achievement in this lucid, graceful work is to restore both the difficulty and the warmth of Nietzsche's message: focusing on four key works, he extends the range of Nietzsche interpretation precisely by virtue of sanity, balance and, above all, humaneness. A new Nietzsche? More like the one who was there all along, waiting for the right reader.

This is an excellent book. It finds a space for its arguments in the already-crowded literature, benefits from a simplicity of writing about complicated matters, and provides the scholarly references in detailed notes.

About the Author

David B. Allison is professor of philosophy at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He is the editor of the groundbreaking anthology The New Nietzsche.