Hannah Arendt

‘Hill sparingly and undramatically chooses her details (without, thankfully, passing over the gossip) . . . She is evidently so used to explaining Arendt’s ideas to nervous freshmen that each chapter contains a SparkNotes-like summary of the major works written during the time period in question. They are concise and comprehensible . . . Hill was well situated to go diving for gems in Arendt’s papers, letters, and marginalia . . . Hill spares us the clichéd, tabloid-ish critiques that make up a sizable chunk of Arendtian lore (“she was a self-hating Jew”; “I can’t believe she loved Heidegger”; “she thought Eichmann’s crimes were banal”; and so on and so forth). Instead, Hill calmly — and quietly, but without truckling — applies her close readings of Arendt’s most controversial ideas to our own oftentimes taut and illiberal social atmosphere.’ — LA Review of Books; ‘The stated aim of Samantha Rose Hill’s new Arendt biography, a slim installment in Reaktion Books’s Critical Lives series, is to introduce this perennially relevant thinker to new readers . . . A brief primer on her life and thinking is timely, given the resurgence of interest . . . While the aim of this biography might be to serve as a brief, lively introduction to Arendt, Hill accomplishes something richer. In introducing us to Arendt's life and thought, what emerges is an example of thinking as a dynamic activity . . . Hill does not present Arendt as a banister to hold up our thinking. Rather, she aptly shows that Arendt is someone to read now because Arendt is someone worth thinking with.’ — Women’s Review of Books; ‘As Hill points out in Hannah Arendt, even in works such as The Origins of Totalitarianism – surprise bestseller of the Trump era – the political is invariably brought back to the personal.’ — Prospect Magazine; ‘This book could hardly appear more opportunely. Arendt’s way of thinking, though original to the point of being difficult to follow, appeals to an increasing number of men and women who question the meaning of their lives in the world we share. Arendt’s own writings and the books and essays analyzing them may seem exhaustive, yet Hill’s work does something new: without simplifying Arendt’s thinking, she opens it to contemporary readers who, in the darkness of our times, will find a friend, a woman, who lived through the darkest of all times.’ — Jerome Kohn, trustee of the Hannah Arendt Bluecher Literary Trust