Volume 56, Number 10 · June 11, 2009
The Wittgenstein Illusion
By Adam Kirsch
The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War
by Alexander Waugh
Doubleday, 333 pp., $28.95
So said Ludwig Wittgenstein in The Blue Book ; but none of the students who pored over that collection of lecture notes, which circulated samizdat -style in the Cambridge of the 1930s, could have guessed at the autobiographical bearing of Wittgenstein's metaphor. For as Alexander Waugh shows in The House of Wittgenstein, the resemblances that united the philosopher with his own family were more than just physical. It was, above all, the ways they suffered that made the Wittgensteins one.
Review, 4317 words
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