Interesting book on philosophers and others. ( )

Spoiler alert: he doesn't like them. ( )

the rise of the intellectual as guiding class and individual lives and faults

Other than saying I loved reading this book, while also being exasperated by what felt like increasingly dishonest authorial motivation, I'll let two of the critical blurbs contained in the volume speak for me. (I've no clue how to rate this with stars.)

From Publishers Weekly: "These pummeling profiles of illustrious intellectuals are caustic, skewed, thought-provoking, and thoroughly engaging."

From Christopher Hitchens: "On every page there is something low, sniggering, mean, and eavesdropped from third-hand."

I'm giving this title 3 stars, not because it isn't a good read -- it's very lively and entertaining. I'm just not sure why Paul Johnson wrote it, unless he had a lot of material left over from other books and wanted to work it up into something. That famous writers and thinkers down through the ages have behaved badly isn't exactly news, at least not to historians.

His selection of subjects is a little uneven. While Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Karl Marx were definitely important intellectual and cultural forces, many of the other writers profiled here (Norman Mailer, Lillian Hellman) seem more like products of existing cultural trends, rather than creators of them.

To sum up, Intellectuals is good gossipy fun, but I'm not sure the author succeeds in making a point. ( )