Transcendentalism Books

Perry Miller's Transcendentalists: An Anthology is essential reading for anyone who wishes to understand the American Transcendentalist movement, its roots, and its growth.

Essays by Emerson, Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and their influential contemporaries are included. Among them are William Ellery Channing, Orestes A. Brownson, Elizabeth Palmer Peadbody, Amos Bronson Alcott, Christopher Pearse Cranch, Theodore Parker, Jones Very, Ellen Sturgis Hooper, Caroline Sturgis Tappan, and Sophia Dana Ripley.

This book is a classic.

I have enjoyed reading Emerson and Thoreau, and so I wanted to gain a deeper insight into their milieu. I had hoped that this book would provide a general overview of transcendentalism while also providing a substantial sampling of the writing of the men and women who shaped (and were shaped by) it. But I have been very disappointed. First, the author fails to provide any general summary of transcendentalism. Worse, he writes as though the reader were already familiar with this topic...which the book purports to introduce and explain! A strange and lethal flaw. Second, the book is a mere anthology of snippets...a few pages from one author, a paragraph or two from another. It is the epitome of superficiality, somewhat like "sampling the cuisine of Europe" by perusing a summary of 25 menus from your arm chair. Not very tasty! None of the selections is long enough to give the reader any real insight into the writers' points of view. On balance, this book is the intellectual equivalent of "Around The World in 15 Microseconds"...and its superficiality is aggravated by the author's failure to provide any meaningful context for the "sights" past which we zoom. There must be something better than this!

The author stated that the works of Emerson and Thoreau were omitted due to limitations of space. However since Emerson is a central character who is referred to frequently, the reader needs some support. I recommend reading the Emerson biography, Robert Richardson's "The Mind on Fire" either before or in conjunction with Miller's book. This book, like Miller's, does a great job of telling the Transcendentalist story . Together, a clear picture emerges. Having Wikipedia nearby is also very helpful as there are extensive references to authors and philisophical terminology. With Wikipedia you will probably have no trouble and will stay engaged regardless of your background.

This is a decent collection of articles on a relatively important topic. However, instead of the inclusion of some articles, which seem to be extraneous and not very helpful in comprehending Kantian-styled TA's, the text should include Stroud's classic article (1968), his 'modest' approach in "The Goal of TA's..."(included in Stern), and his article on "kantian Invulnerability...." For Stroud's articles, see his anthology Understanding Human Knowledge (Oxford UP). I also recommend looking up A. Brueckner's articles (TA 1, TA 2, etc...), which should have been included in Stern's anthology.

I also recommend reading over Strawson's Individuals, yet again.

This is a decent collection of articles on a relatively important topic. However, instead of the inclusion of some articles, which seem to be extraneous and not very helpful in comprehending Kantian-styled TA's, the text should include Stroud's classic article (1968), his 'modest' approach in "The Goal of TA's..."(included in Stern), and his article on "kantian Invulnerability...." For Stroud's articles, see his anthology Understanding Human Knowledge (Oxford UP). I also recommend looking up A. Brueckner's articles (TA 1, TA 2, etc...), which should have been included in Stern's anthology.

I also recommend reading over Strawson's Individuals, yet again.

This is quite a scholarly work and reads like a thesis - a bit dense but well documented. The focus is in on the theory and intellectual aspects of Transcendentalism. Surprisingly little, however, on Utopianism in general, or influences of Thomas Moore in specific. I was living in Harvard MA, site of the Fruitlands, and found the book useful for research purposes.

This is a scholarly work and reads like a thesis - a bit dense, but well documented. The focus is on the intellectual underpinnings of the Transcendentalist movement in the mid 19th Century. With the name "Utopias", however, it seams lacking in a clearer treatment of Utopianism is general, or in influences from Thomas Moore, in specific. Perhaps that isn't considered relevent, but I would have liked to have seen it. None-the-less, an excellent source for research in this area of early intentional communities, which were truly the New Age movements of their time.

Bossart's book begins with a long chapter studying Kant's Transcendental Deduction in the Critique of Pure Reason. He uses this chapter to set up a series of philosophical problems that are subsequentely addressed by Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida and Nietzsche (who ultimately shows there is a problem with the whole project).

As an interpretation of this philosophical tradition as a whole, the book is reasonable, and at some points truly isightful. This is not the strength of the book. The book's great strength lies in the first chapter on the Critique of Pure Reason. Bossart's analysis of Kant's argument, and his articulation of its philosophical implications is first rate, and will be extremely valuable reading for old and new students of Kant.

I strongly recommend this book for its study of the argument of the Transcendental Deduction.

*Hawthorne's Fuller Mystery* is an insightful feminist take on four works by Nathaniel Hawthorne: "Rappaccini's Daughter," *The Scarlet Letter, The Blithedale Romance,* and *The Marble Faun.* This is a book with (PhD?) thesis: behind Hawthorne's most affecting fiction after 1841 lies the author's unresolved conflict between the angelic, worshipping, emasculating Sophia Peabody, the author's wife whose role the author himself created, and the protean, independent, upsetting, liberating radical Margaret Fuller (1810-1850).

Anyone who has puzzled over the paradoxes of "Rappaccini's Daughter" will be grateful for Mitchell's complex, revelatory reading of this story. Anyone who has wondered what lay behind the appalling decline in only one year from *The Scarlet Letter* (1850) to *The House of the Seven Gables* (1851) will find a persuasive account here. Mitchell is brilliant on *The Blithedale Romance* (1852), admittedly an easy book about which to be brilliant, and more energetic and illuminating on *The Marble Faun* (1860) than other, longer-winded critics. On all these topics and much else (the role of Emerson, sidelong glances at the Hawthorne marriage and Julian Hawthorne's misleading portrayal of it)*Hawthorne's Fuller Mystery* is first rate.

I have three gripes. Mitchell's thesis leads him to over-emphasize Emerson's presence behind the portrait of Roger Chillingworth in *The Scarlet Letter* and consequently to downplay the extent to which Hawthorne's identification with the scientific analyst is behind this powerful portrait (to be fair, Mitchell says this, but he makes too little of it). Some of the writing is academic-clotted-e. g., on p. 181: "Pike was too good a friend, however, to probe Hawthorne for the origins of his power to penetrate what Pike termed `the deepest, profoundest' or `the inmost of all the emotions' once he had turned away, as Hollingsworth did not, from the love of and for a Sophia-like Phoebe and returned, in a Zenobia, to another Hester." HELP! Finally, the book would benefit from condensing, simplification. Some quotes are used three times.

Nonetheless, if you know the writing of Hawthorne, you'll want to read *Hawthorne's Fuller Mystery.*

The author defends a distinction initiated by Kant which was taken up, transformed and further explored by Husserl. The distinction is that between a transcendental and an empirical aspect of subjectivity. It expresses the fact that the subject is at once a subject for the world and an object in the world. The empirical self is accommodated in the objective world very easily: it is just one object among others in the world. Yet, the other aspect of subjectivity, expressed by Kant as the "transcendental unity of apperception": the precondition of experience, and by Husserl as the "meaning bestowing" subject, seems not to fit in the objective world. Hence an aspect of "the paradox of subjectivity", the subject does not seem to be part of the world.

The distinction has been the object of severe criticism as being just another aspect of the `metaphysics of the subject' from different quarters: positivism, French structuralism and Heidegger among others.

Carr counters Heideggers' attack as being based on a misreading of the authors of the transcendental tradition. He argues that both Husserl and Kant were not expounding a theory of a substantive subject instead they were trying to describe a certain point of view of the world. Carr notes that conceiving the subject as such, as a point of view, does not involve a metaphysic of the subject as neither Kant nor Husserl, pace Heidegger's criticism, conceived the subject as an ultimate substance. The analysis of Heideggers' interpretation comprises the first chapter of the book.

In the next two chapters Carr presents Kant's and Husserl's theories on transcendental subjectivity. The analyses here, as in the chapter on Heidegger are really overviews. Being such, it is not going to offer any new insight to the thought of either one of these philosophers. Yet, as it is rare that one could be an expert on all three philosophers, the analyses might be of interest to non specialists.

In chapter four Carr tries to bring together the views of Kant and Husserl, whose unity he traces more to method or approach rather than to doctrine. According to both these thinkers subjectivity has two aspects: being a subject for the world and being an object in the world.

The sole purpose of the distinction between transcendental and empirical subjectivity is to do justice to the fact that the subject can be viewed under two radically different descriptions. This according to Carr is an ineliminable albeit paradoxical phenomenological fact. And philosophies such as positivism which try do away with it cannot be true to the character of experience.

Experience reveals additionally to the empirical self: the self that is the object of knowledge (our body and our mental states), some aspects which must be explained if possible, even described and taken for granted but not done away with. Now these aspects involve the feeling of spontaneity or agency that every human subject feels, which can also be expressed by the fact that we take ourselves to be someone, e.g. a thinker. Yet these facts lead to paradoxes: elusiveness is another, the thinker which thinks can never be the object of its thought. Countering the views which reduce the self to a fictitious entity Carr asks, fiction for whom?

To this question Husserl answers "to the meaning bestowing subject" and Kant "to the precondition of experience". Now the question is whether these answers can really be seen in a non metaphysical manner. Either way, both Kant and Husserl bring to light a problem, the problem of subjectivity, which current philosophies try to do away with in a prejudiced way, metaphysically favoring elliminativism and materialist reductions. Carr's book does not settle the question. Its merit however is that it focuses on a problem which has to be faced -something both Kant and Husserl did- and not be hastily eliminated.

Description
This book attempts to reveal the Eastern roots of the transcendentalist thought of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Not only modern England, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain, but also ancient Egypt, Persia, India, and China were favorite hunting grounds of knowledge for Emerson. Thoreau recommended the Bhagavad Gita enthusiastically, asserting that the book deserves to be read with reverence even by Yankees. There was probably no one in the West who so ardently loved and recommended Hindu literature as Thoreau. Be this as it may, the Eastern side of both of these men's thought is widely neglected in studies. This work seeks to mend this blind-spot in the scholarly approaches to Emerson and Thoreau.



Reviews
"Dr. Shoji Goto [joins with] such current interpreters as Wai-Chi Dimock in finding that, while Emerson and Thoreau themselves celebrated international commonalities, their American interpreters have too long followed a parochial, nation-centered paradigm. Open textual evidence, whether Emerson's long interest in Persian prophets or Thoreau's recording of Confucius, has been overlooked or taken as mere rhetorical flourish. It is time for a `sea change.'" - Professor Phyllis Cole, Pennsylvania State University

I was not wholly impressed with this collection of transcendentalist works. The selections do not completely flow and the introductory material is often repetitive. I also did not completely agree with what are considered "essential" texts. It left me a bit confused at times. But probably a good intro to Transcendentalism if you are new to that genre.

When we think of Transcendentalism, we first turn to Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. But the literary movement was made up of more personalities than just those two men; and while "Nature" and "Walden" are key writings, they're not the only examples anyone can or should read. Hence the need and attraction of any transcendental anthology: it brings us multiple voices, perhaps even some unfamiliar or unusual ones.

This volume represents a very small portion of those possibilities. Included are readings from Sampson Reed, James Marsh, Amos Bronson Alcott, Frederic Henry Hedge, and Margaret Fuller, in addition to Emerson and Thoreau. Geldard's focus here is captured by the word "essential." In his introduction, he clarifies that the word "not only speaks to the choices made from the huge body of material available but also reflects a vision of what is essential in measuring the value and meaning of human life as seen through the lives and minds of what has been come to be known as the Concord circle." A noble mission, indeed. The final section of the book studies the transcendental heritage as it continued in the words of Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Wallace Stevens, Loren Eiseley, and Annie Dillard.

"The Essential Transcendentalists" can be considered a basic introduction to the movement. One of its strong points is the historical treatment it provides in the opening section of the book. But while it includes portions of Emerson's "Nature" and Thoreau's "Walden," it ignores poets like Jones Very and William Ellery Channing as well as a number of essay writers and lecturers. The "essentials" as presented here stir us to seek out more.

Readers craving more selections can turn to one of four substantial anthologies of transcendental writings: "The American Transcendentalists: Essential Writings" (Lawrence Buell, ed., 2006); "Transcendentalism: A Reader" (Joel Myerson, ed., 2000); "The Transcendentalists: An Anthology" (Perry Miller, 1977), or "The American Transcendentalists: Their Prose and Poetry" (Perry Miller, 1957). Each anthology has a focus, and surprisingly little overlap occurs when comparing their contents. And each contains a few jewels not found in any other contemporary anthology. Happy hunting!

Early east coast settlements in America brought to the new frontier a basic fear and distrust of nature, not really a healthy attitude for a young nation with a whole continent of conquest ahead of it. Thus the Salem witch craft trials, and further extremes of puritanism that must have perturbed thinking individuals of the early 1800s. The early transcendalists looked for a way of dialoguing with these people, taking care not to alienate them, but at the same time not giving up their pursuit of freedom and truth. Not much was available within this new American culture, so the transcendalists looked back to the wisdom of the ancients for inspiration. Emerson did a lot of the preliminary work in finding a new spiritual tone and vocabulary, blending the ancients, the puritans, the science of the day, into a set of ideas that the common man could grasp and run with as America began to develop its own unique culture. A hard core group of thinkers joined in with Emerson in espousing these new ideas. Some of their seminal writings are included in this volume.

I read Geldard's other title, Spiritual Writings of Emerson, first, because I was impressed back in my English lit days of years gone by, with some of Emerson's ideas, and of course his clever quotes, but never really completely understood what he was all about, nor Thoreau, nor any of the transcendentalists. This book so clearly spelled out the essence of Emerson's message to me that I wanted to know more about the other writers in this movement.

Why? Because the culture we have now is, well, in need of reform, and the voices and ideas out there are so many that it's confusing. So I'm thinking I start where Emerson started, by listening to what's inside of me instead of clinging to institutionalized thinking, what Emerson called "lowly listening". I've only read a little of Geldard's new book and it is teaching me how to listen.

The book is an attempt to understand a large area from a narrow field of vision akin to a chemist evaluating a rare wine based on it's chemical composition without ever tasting it. To know is different than to know about. The difference between the great scholar Joseph Campbell and the great mystic Ramana Maharshi.

I found this a fun book, and a very audacious one, as it displays the author's considerable knowledge from philosophy to General Relativity and Eastern mysticism. A frequent contributor to this reviewer's blog on evolution, Darwiniana, Mr. Smith is also an acute critic of the reigning orthodoxy of Neo-Darwinism, and understands the need for a completely transformed paradigm. His ability as a trained scientist (in population genetics no less) to stand back from evolutionary dogmatism deserves support. Although our perspectives differ somewhat, witness some of our debates at the blog, as in a debate between the Kantians and Hegelians, I found the basic effort to storm the summit fascinating at each stage: the basic intuition is right, we have to find a synthesis of post-Newtonian sciences, relativity and the quantum, the complexities of consciousness as evidenced in the great sutras of antiquity, and the philosophies of history that stand as a challenge to the versions prouduced via Darwinian scientism. Smith with his hypotheses as to 'trinity' makes me think of the subject of classic Samkhya where the cascade of evolutionary triads speaks to an intuition about 'evolution' lost to modern science. The author seems to be trying to rediscover the non-dual aspects of a deeper reality behind the surface of evolution.

Ah! This was a delightful book with historical significance! I had no idea of the literary talent concentrated in Concord, MA during an important time in our nation's history--the 1840-60's+. Susan Cleever wrote an entertaining "story" about our most prominent storytellers.

Ms. Cheever makes you want to read...or perhaps reread and understand for the first time...the works of writers who shaped American thought and history.

AMERICAN BLOOMSBURY is a study of the "genius cluster" centered in Concord, Massachusetts, 1835 - 1888, beginning with the arrival of Ralph Waldo Emerson and ending with the death of the last of the neighborhood's classic writers in the neighborhood. With the inheritance from a short-lived first wife from a wealthy family, Emerson largely supported friends like Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, the Alcott family and Margaret Fuller as they launched their careers. They shared Transcendentalism and a passion for intellectual pursuit. As in most close-knit communities, they had their intrigues, jealousies and fall-outs. The hope and beauty of a New England spring day is reflected in their early ambitions and again in their salutes to one another at the end of their lives. The themes they drew on, the events they witnessed at home and abroad, and the impact of the Civil War articulate the greater American experience of the 19th century.

Though I'm very familiar with the writers' works, I hadn't studied their lives closely and this was a good general introduction, often full of surprises. Cheever vividly evokes the personages and setting with a storyteller's skill. I did not realize how fully she developed them until I felt the pang of loss as their mortality set in. This is by no means exhaustive biography or history; in fact, Cheever moves through it rather breathlessly. Her style is intended for a very general audience, not an academic one.

The book is not perfect. Although she moves from 1835 to the last death, of Louisa May Alcott who is only a child at the outset, Cheever chooses to order her information around themes or events in their lives, which do not necessarily flow chronologically. She kind of swirls around and around as she moves through the 19th century. In one chapter, even one paragraph, she may bounce back and forth between several years. The coming of the railroad is experienced more than once, though from slightly different perspectives. Poor Margaret Fuller drowns at least 3 times. Sometimes you are left asking, now when exactly is this happening? Her chapters are quite short, 3 - 5 pages, which makes for a rather breakneck pace through the facts. She provides a time line, plenty of research notes and citations and an extensive bibliography at the back of the book that help answer questions that may arise.

This book has a lot to recommend it as an introduction to several brilliant individuals whose lives crossed paths in Concord, Massachusetts between about 1840 and 1870. It is an enjoyable, easy read -- with very short chapters that are organized around themes and encounters rather than strict chronology. The book brings these characters to life, reading between the lines of letters, books and journals to capture their unspoken thoughts and feelings for each other. It shows how the lives and thoughts of these thinkers, who rarely mention one another or acknowledge their debts to each other in their published works, are deeply intertwined. It also makes a serious effort to take them out of "ancient" history and show how their concerns and conceptions are not so far away from our own.

It is this concern, however, to show the relevance of the lives of people like Thoreau, Emerson, Fuller, Hawthorne, Bronson and Louisa Alcott, that also accounts for several of the major weaknesses of the book. Ms. Cheever tries so hard to show that these individuals are just like us that the book reads almost like tabloid journalism -- especially in the first several chapters. I was reminded several times as I read the book of Goethe's maxim that "no one is a hero to his valet" -- that from a certain perspective even the most distinctive individuals look like ordinary folk who have passions and drives and needs and just happen to be in the right place at the right time. Only rarely does the book give a hint at what makes these individuals remarkable -- although the author is obviously fascinated by them, her descriptions of them make them seem just like peculiar and idiosyncratic folk with a sense of grandeur and peculiar ideas that made them stand out against the norm but not much more. I never got a clear sense from the book of how the ideas of these thinkers connect with their lives, and the book never gives a clear sense of what their ideas were beyond very superficial descriptions. The account of Emerson suggests again and again that apart from being charismatic and a clever writer, his most important contribution was to have inherited enough money from his first marriage to enable him to be generous with the others and create a community around him. I never saw any indication that Cheever had any idea how powerful and radical Emerson's thought really was. (Her suggestion that Thoreau and the rest of the transcendentalists were leeches on Emerson is one of many examples where Cheever chooses which of the many existing rumors to believe and report as if it were fact rather than making sure it is -- at least in the case of Thoreau, this rumor is clearly false -- as Walter Harding has shown in his excellent biography, Thoreau was very careful not to owe anything and worked hard in his father's pencil factory or later in life at surveying or even manual labor to take care of his needs, and even made sure to pay rent when he was living in his parents' house as a boarder, and had agreed with Emerson to do work around the house in exchange for room and board when he lived with him).

Part of the problem is that Ms. Cheever can't seem to decide whether she wants to write a tabloid style expose of the love lives of the Concord geniuses, or a popular history, or a personal account of her own fascination with that history. In the last half of the book Ms. Cheever figures more and more prominently in the book -- her personal feelings and responses to the history begin to overwhelm that history. For example, she can have no sympathy whatsoever for (and no clear understanding of) the Concord thinkers' admiration for John Brown -- because she cannot understand why they would have seen him as anything else than what she sees him to be: a cold-hearted murderer, whose passionate ideals led to outrageous and insane actions. In the end, I think that the best way to describe this book is not as a genuine history, but as an imaginative attempt to tell the story of these characters that Ms. Cheever had come to love in a way that made sense of them to her. While there is value in such an approach, it should not be mistaken for an accurate history. As other reviewers note, she invents a great deal and reads a great deal into things that may not be there (e.g. Alcott's admiration for Thoreau and Emerson is read as her having fallen in love with her teacher and her father's friend). The book is also in need of some serious editing -- there are several parenthetical points or asides or statements of fact irrelevant to the paragraphs or chapters in which they are included. Several words are misused consistently throughout ("insure" is used when she means "ensure," for example).

I did enjoy reading this book quite a bit -- I'd read Emerson and Thoreau and read biographies of both, but had never read an account of all the remarkable people whose lives connected in Concord. It is a quick and easy read -- and gives a valuable shorthand version of the period that I will definitely want to flesh out by reading some of the other biographies and history that she relied upon and mentions in her notes at the end. Ms. Cheever obviously cares about the people she writes about -- and it would be hard to walk away from this volume without likewise caring.

Susan Cheever has written a short book on the lives of the famed New England transcendentalists who were in the vanguard of the literary renaissance of nineteenth century America. The book is not profound but makes for good bedtime reading.
The less than 300 page book focuses on the literary geniuses who lived in Concord west of Boston in the mid-nineteenth century:
1. Ralph Waldo Emerson was the father of the transcendentalist movement in America. Emerson (1803-1882) left he Unitarian pulpit due to his unorthodox views even for that liberal denomination. He was a great essayists and orator who travled widely in America and abroad. His great friend Thoreau may have been in love with Emerson's wife Lidian. Emerson died with alzheimer's disease. He was a relatively wealthy man who aided many of his poorer transcendentalists. He believed in Nature and the divine in each human being as preferable to belief in the God of the Bible. His work was influenced by such writers as Thomas Carlyle and philosophers such as Immanuel Kant who believed in the moral imperative.
Emerson was sometimes called the "American Plato".
2. Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) is famous for "Walden" reporting on his life near Walden Pond in a cabin owned by his friend Emerson. Thoreau was a Harvard graduate, a naturalist and an opponent of slavery. He was friendly with the mad abolitionist John Brown. Throreau was jailed for failure to pay his taxes. He condemned the Mexican War as a land grab which would add slave states to the Union. Thoreau never married; he and his older brother John were in love with the same woman who dumped both of them! He died of TB at a young age.
3. Margaret Fuller died at age 50 being drowned in a shipwreck near Fire Island. She had returned to America with her Italian lover and her baby. Margaret was an early feminist who may have had affairs with both Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Her book on the life of women in the nineteenth century has become a classic. She was the probable model for the character of Hester Prynne in the Hawthorne classic "The Scarlet Letter."
She was brilliant, beautiful and a woman living before her time!
4. Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864)was born in Salem site of the infamous witchcraft trials of the seventeenth century.
Hawthorne married Sophie Peabody one of the famed women rights and abolitionists sisters. In his early married life he lived in the Old Manse owned by Emerson. He was involved in politics supporting his Bowdoin college friend Franklin Pierce. After Democratic candidate Pierce was sworn in as the 14th president his friend Hawthorne was appointed as US Consul in Liverpool. Hawthorne had a happy marriage and loved his two children. he did have an amorous interest in the fetching Margaret Fuller.
Hawthorne is best known for his novels "The House of the Seven Gables,"; "The Scarlet Letter" and "The Marble Faun." His novel "The Blithedale Romance" is a roman a clef based on the months he lived at the utopian experimental Brook Farm. The character of "Zenobia" in that work is also a picture of Margaret Fuller. Hawthorne could be cold and reclusive but is one of our first great authors. Herman Melville's "Moby Dick" is dedicated to Hawthorne in token of their friendship.
5. Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888) was the tomboy daughter of the eccentric Bronson Alcott who established the utopian community of "Fruitlands." Alcott grew up in a poor family which was often supported by friends most notably Ralph Waldon Emerson. Louisa May served as a nurse in the Civil War writing "Hospital Sketches" of her time in New York nursing Union wounded. She contracted mercury poisoning and died a few days after her father in 1888. She is best known for the immortal "Little Women."
Cheever reports on her love for the transcendentalists and their friends. She tells us how she enjoys their work and relates stories of the visits she and her family have made to Concord.
This book is not a scholarly dissection of the works of these New England intellectuals. It is one woman's loving account of the personal lives of these New England geniuses.