The World As I Found It - Softcover

Duffy, Bruce

4.21

629 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0395900573 ISBN 13: 9780395900574

Publisher: Mariner Books, 1987

View all copies of this ISBN edition:

THE WORLD AS I FOUND IT centers around Ludwig Wittgenstein, one of the most powerfully magnetic philosophers of our time--brilliant, tortured, mercurial, forging his own solitary path while leaving a permanent mark on all around him.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

About the Author:

Bruce Duffy is the author of the autobiographical novel Last Comes the Egg (1997), and—to appear June 2011—Disaster Was My God, a novel based on the life and work of the poet Arthur Rimbaud. An only child raised in a Catholic middle-class family in suburban Maryland, Duffy sees the 1962 death of his mother—essentially by medical malpractice— as what pushed him to be a writer. Duffy graduated from the University of Maryland in 1973, and has hitchhiked twice across the United States, worked construction, washed dishes, hopped freight trains with hoboes, and reported stories that have taken him to Haiti, Bosnia, and Taliban Afghanistan. Today he lives just outside Washington, D.C., works as a speechwriter, is married to a psychotherapist, and has two grown daughters and a stepson. Writing in Salon, Joyce Carol Oates named The World As I Found It as one of “five great nonfiction novels,” calling it “one of the most ambitious first novels ever published.” A former Guggenheim
fellow, Duffy has won the Whiting Writers’ Award and a Lila Wallace–Reader’s Digest Award.
David Leavitt ’s books include The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer and the novel The Indian Clerk, a finalist for both the PEN/Faulkner Prize and the IMPAC /Dublin Literary Award. He co-directs the MFA program in Creative Writing at the University of Florida.Bruce Duffy was born in Washington, D.C., the son of Irish American parents. His novels include The World as I Found It and Last Comes the Egg. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, and the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Award. He lives in Maryland.

From Library Journal:

"This," asserts the author, "is fiction." Though a detailed narrative of the life and times of eminent 20th-century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, "it is not history, philosophy, or biography." Duffy's first novel is not for the reader looking to understand contemporary philosophy; indeed, philosophers may object to its use as a gloss on a young man's private anguish. And some readers may wonder whether the many characters borrowed from real life are being fairly represented. But readers who like a broad canvas will find this work appealing, moving as it does from uppercrust Vienna to pre-war Cambridge to the battlefields of World War I and World War II. Alas, there is some infelicitous phrasing here, and the discussions of what's doing in philosophy can read like an encyclopedia. But in scope and ambition this work is finally compelling. Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.