As has been pointed out by other people here, this book is a wasted opportunity. There is a good story in the Bourbaki mathematical collective and a very good story in Alexandre Grothendieck. But he leaves out or butchers so much!

1) there's no attempt at explaining any mathematical idea that I noticed;

2) if he attempts to explain how the Bourbaki idea of a structure differs from a common-sense one it passed me by;

3) whenever a new person is introduced, we get a new paragraph and 'X was born in [YEAR]...'--no variation at all!;

4) in skimming over Oulipo, he completely fails to mention Georges Perec--whose biography in many ways mirrors Grothendieck's--a great writer who produced genuine masterpieces on the basis of some unpromising-sounding procedures;

5) while I know a certain amount about linguistics and mathematics, I certainly didn't glean a decent idea of what structuralism is or was from this book;

6) I'm not too sure about the bibliography either: the 'Essays on General Linguistics' attributed to Jakobson is unknown to both Amazon and Bookfinder;

7) there is no attempt to assess whether Bourbaki was a good or bad thing--in fact, I've never met anyone (including mathematicians trained in France) who thought their influence was other than negative;

8) similarly, it *should* be easy enough to chart the rise and fall of Bourbaki's influence in terms of sales, citations, etc rather than just relying on unsupported assertions;

9) who is the artist of the title?

Tsk, tsk! ( )

Interesting but very poorly structured, which is ironic of a book discussing the band of mathematicians largely responsible for the success of the philosophy of structuralism. ( )

Amir Aczel is as frustrating an author as you will find anywhere. The man is bright, no question about it. He also has impeccable taste when it comes to interesting subjects to investiagte. He has written books on various mathematical subjects: Fermat's Last Theorem, Descarte, and now Nicolas Bourbaki. Yet his followthrough and his writing habits are infuriatingly inconsistent and shows signs of discordant chaos in his reasoning. He also has a disconcerting proclivity towards doing a hack job on a subject to get paid and then moving on to better things.

The story of Bourbaki is a fascinating one, so I was eager to read this book. The miniscule size of this book should have been a red flag, Aczel's reputation, at least in my head, should have been another, but I proceeded to buy it because I am an eternal optimist and I believe that people can and will surprise me and change my preconceived notions.

It didn't work this time, nor any other times when I placed my faith in Aczel. So where to begin?

1) As the previous reviewers had stated, there are no math in this book. No explanation of what Bourbaki was up to. How do you write a book on mathematicians without writing about mathematics? I understand that one does not wish to populate the book with excesive mathematical details but the power of math is in its compact notations. He does try to explain things in general terms, but a few figures and a few lines of math would have done wonders to his narrative.
2) Not enough back ground material was covered. When Aczel is trying to explain the application of structuralism in linguistics and in psychology, he was doing some extremely fine narration of extremely dense and abstract ideas and putting them into the context of what Levi-Strauss and others are trying to do, but he was not consistent in narrating the other parts of the book, he did a lot of hand waving and hot air generating.
3) As an author writing about people, one can definitely become enamoured with certain people and grow to dislike certain others. Aczel definitely fell in love with Alexander Grothendieck's story and disliked Andre and Simohne Weil. It is irresponsible, however, for Aczel come out and say that the reason for the demise of Bourbaki is because Grothendieck left the group without explaining fully WHY category theory is a more reasonable foundation. It is equally irresponsible for the ad hominem attacks on Andre Weil's character without citing specific instances of his behavior.
4) The book reads like a very bad draft, there is no continuity to the history and the book is not built around mathematical logic nor is it based on chronological order, it is as if Aczel decided to put all these bits of stories and mathematics together haphazardously. The writing is very jagged. Reading and making sense of the story is extremely fatiguing because the author made every effort to confuse the reader. Many anecdotes are repeated for no apparent reason and they are repeated without qualifiers or additional information.
5) There does not seem to be any care taken to build a case for or against anything. The author just scattered facts and his own opinions out and it was up to the readers to figure out a logic for themselves.
6) As in his previous books, the author seem to be building toward a conclusion, a crescendo in the narrative, yet after the build up, there is no crescendo, nor a diminuendo, there is just a monotone white noise in the background.

Like I said, this is a massively wasted effort towards a very interesting subject. The only thing that I have gotten from this book is the germination of various subjects that the author mentioned in passing, so thank you Amir Aczel for your bibliography and a desultory book report. ( )