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Born of American parents in Paris, Curtis Cate was educated in France, England, and the United States. He is the holder of three university degrees - from Harvard (History), the -cole des Langues Orientales, Paris (Russian), and Magdalen College, Oxford, where he read Politics and Economics and studied English and German philosophy with Harry Weldon. After serving as a correspondent in the Middle East, he joined the staff of the Atlantic Monthly, and was for eight years its European Editor in Paris. His published works include three highly acclaimed biographies (of Antoine de Saint-Exup-ry, George Sand, and Andr- Malraux), a harrowing description of Napoleon's disastrous invasion of Russia in 1812, and The Ides of August, which he wrote to condemn the building of the Berlin Wall in August 1961. This is his seventh book.
For the nonspecialist and philosophical adept as well: an accessible, anecdotally rich life of the trenchant idealist who turned philosophical idealism upside-down. Nietzsche's life (1844-1900) offers one of the great moments of philosophy, a cry of the wounded soul: just before suffering a final descent into mental illness in 1889, he happened upon a carter beating a nag in the streets of Genoa and flung his arms around the poor beast, protecting it from further abuse. Cate (Andre Malraux, 1997, etc.) notes that we will probably never know what happened next, inasmuch as the first printed account of the incident appeared a couple of years after the philosopher's death. Just so, much of Nietzsche's life has been the subject of speculation, especially on the matter of whether Nietzsche gave ideological aid and comfort to Nazism: some scholars hold that Nietzsche's evocation of the law-unto-himself superman gave Hitler and company certain ideas, whereas others believe that Nietzsche's protofascist sister willfully altered his writings after his death, bringing out a thick anthology of his hastily jotted but so far unpublished notes under the inflammatory title The Will to Power. It does not help either argument, Cate notes, that Nietzsche himself was a disorderly writer easily capable of being misunderstood; but, he adds, Nietzsche had grounds for his unusual methods of composition and apothegmatic style, for he believed-correctly, as it turned out-that he was doomed to die young and did not have the time to be tidy. Such convictions also rationalize Nietzsche's inability to handle money, his restlessness, and his devotion to the life-celebrating but feather-ruffling habits of the Dionysian personality type, an invention of Nietzsche's that found its most celebrated follower in the composer Richard Wagner. Cate carefully explains the development of Nietzsche's thought from Schopenhauerian acolyte to independent-and unique-thinker, some of whose most powerful work was penned before he was 30. A touch more readable than Ronald Hayman's Nietzsche (1980) and more current than Walter Kaufmann's Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (1974), both of which Cate complements but does not displace. (Kirkus Reviews)
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