Huenemann, Charlie. Review of Julian Young, NIETZSCHE: A PHILOSOPHICAL BIOGRAPHY. NDPR (June 2010).

Young, Julian. Nietzsche: a Philosophical Biography. Cambridge: CUP, 2010. Simply put, this is an excellent biography of Nietzsche, and a model of what a philosophical biography should be. Young offers a smooth integration of biographical detail and philosophical analysis so that one can readily see how Nietzsche's life and thought informed one another. He stakes out some controversial interpretive claims, but even setting these aside, Young has produced a study that must be read by every Nietzsche scholar and by anyone interested more generally in the shaping of the modern philosophical landscape. Among other Nietzsche biographies available in English, Young's biography improves hugely upon Safranski (2002) and Hollingdale (1965), and sizably upon both Kaufmann (1950) and Hayman (1980) in scope and detail. It is a difficult balance to achieve, but Young has a keen sense of exactly how much detail to relate without becoming tedious and tiresome. He vividly describes the particulars of Nietzsche's very real "living concerns" -- his fragile health, his financial limits, his changing relations with family and friends, and his constant quest to find the atmospheric conditions for his work -- without reducing Nietzsche's thoughts to these concerns. Young preserves this balance by alternating between sections of mainly biographical material and sections with more substantive philosophical analysis. He usefully enlists a wide array of materials, from Nietzsche's notebooks to the correspondence of his various acquaintances (both with Nietzsche and with one another) in order to illuminate Nietzsche's life and thought. And so we are provided with helpful accounts of the relevant historical and political circumstances, including the events of the Franco-Prussian war, Bismarck's rise to power, and the growth of Bayreuth and the Wagner industry. At the same time, we are given stimulating and informed philosophical discussions of Hölderlin, Schopenhauer, and (once again) Wagner. All of these discussions combine to provide a rich sense of Nietzsche's circumstances -- social, historical, and intellectual. . . . Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=19891.