What particularly informs this work is a certain sense of sly irony, in as much as while the author has no lack of respect for the life and work of Richard Hofstadter, he doesn't gloss over Hofstadter's failure to grasp how he had become quite the organization man by the time his style of politics and history came under fire in the Sixties; a period that Hofstadter was prepared to write off as the "Age of Rubbish." The question has to be whether the man could have reinvented himself for the era of the rise of the talking-head expert, or whether he would have dwindled away to being a mere curiosity had he lived longer than fifty-four years; one has to suspect the latter, as Hofstadter tended to recoil from conflict for its own sake. ( )

An impression : I have read an except of this book, and a few reviews of it including all those heretofore posted on 'Amazon'. Thus what I have is an 'impression' of the book, and not an in-depth understanding.
My impression is simply that it is a very good book. One reviewer Ronald Clark says that David S. Brown meets the challenge well of narrating both the story of the life, and the content of the books, or the intellectual development.
This seems to me the key thing in a book of this kind. I recently read an excellent detailed biography of an important intellectual figure which went into every possible aspect of the daily life without confronting the ideas and the intellectual development. It simply did not do the job.
Brown sees Hofstader as not simply a committed liberal, but as a political thinker who was able to react to the changing challenges he met throughout his life. He was an intellectual whose thought involved reacting to events, and not simply fitting them into a predisposed pattern.
He has been faulted for misunderstanding and not doing real justice to ' conservative thought'. This may well be the case. But then again his major years of working and writing were years of such great Liberal predominance that this is in some way not surprising.
Hoftstader is credited with being the most savvy and moderate of the 'New York Intellectuals' especially in regard to his relation to and support of the Democratic Party.
In telling of the life Brown tells of Hoftstader's tragic loss of his first- wife, his successful second marriage. The father of two children, a son Dan from his first marriage, and Sarah from his second he seems to have been an excellent and responsive father. His son Dan speaks highly of him and of his irrevent sense of humor, a quality not especially felt in the books.
My sense is that this is a responsible and respectable work from which one can learn much about an important American intellectual.