I believe in revisiting older books around here, so why not older reviews? This one’s not even that old. Last fall, the Claremont Review of Books published Cheryl Miller’s take on House of Wits: An Intimate Portrait of the James Family by Paul Fisher. I’m a fervid William James fan, so the book caught my eye when it was published. Miller has dampened my eagerness to read it by discussing its approach in the larger context of biographical trends:

The pathographer sees himself as deconstructing myths, refusing, as Fisher puts it, to let the success of great men “obscur[e] the real complexity of famous lives.” Instead, the pathographer promises to expose great men for the “bad little fictions” they really are. Yet, as bold and iconoclastic as the pathographer thinks he is, he is actually in thrall to a much more powerful, enduring mythology: the myth of the tortured artist or the dysfunctional genius.

I recommend reading the whole thing.

(Via Arts & Letters Daily)