A Life in the Academy

A delightful journey that takes the author from his second year of life to his seventy-fourth.  Along the way, Wolff gives us an inside look at Harvard, the University of Chicago, Columbia, the University of Massachusetts, and a variety of other institutions of higher learning in the United States and South Africa.

Wolff met a number of well-known intellectuals and academics, from Bertrand Russell to Henry Kissinger to E.O. Wilson, and he seems to have almost total recall of his interactions with them.

Wolff, who is best known around the world for his little tract, In Defense of Anarchism, published twenty-one books and wrote a half dozen others.  This compelling memoir offers a vivid picture of the American Academy during what will some day be looked back on as its golden years.