Adorno: A Biography - Tapa blanda

Exhaustively researched and presented with exemplary balance, Müller-Doohm’s re-creation of Adorno’s “damaged life” is fully worthy of its demanding subject. No future student of one of the twentieth century’s most influential thinkers will be able to ignore this remarkable achievement in intellectual biography.
Martin Jay

Although Adorno died in 1969, we have had to wait more than thirty years for a biography ... Stefan Müller-Doohm's is the most detailed and probably the best.

A very informative account of Adorno's life, which has much to offer casual readers of Adorno and those with a thorough interest in his work... It ties a narrative description of Adorno's life to a sensitive understanding of his thought, and of the consistency of his reflection across the different disciplinary boundaries that it traversed ... This book does all the things a biography should.

Selected as a Book of the Year by the Independent on Sunday

'Even the biographical individual is a social category', wroteAdorno. 'It can only be defined in a living context together withothers.' In this major new biography, Stefan Muller-Doohm turnsthis maxim back on Adorno himself and provides a rich andcomprehensive account of the life and work of one of the mostbrilliant minds of the twentieth century.

This authoritative biography ranges across the whole of Adorno'slife and career, from his childhood and student years to his yearsin emigration in the United States and his return to postwarGermany. At the same time, Muller-Doohm examines the full range ofAdorno's writings on philosophy, sociology, literary theory, musictheory and cultural criticism. Drawing on an array of sources fromAdorno's personal correspondence with Horkheimer, Benjamin, Berg, Marcuse, Kracauer and Mann to interviews, notes and both publishedand unpublished writings, Muller-Doohm situates Adorno'scontributions in the context of his times and provides a rich andbalanced appraisal of his significance in the 20th Century as awhole.

Muller-Doohm's clear prose succeeds in making accessible some ofthe most complex areas of Adorno's thought. This outstandingbiography will be the standard work on Adorno for years to come.