“Eventually, most wised-up readers of history come to agree with the advice of E. H. Carr, cited and honored by David S. Brown, that ‘Before you study the history, study the historian.’ The payoff of Brown’s effort comes in Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography, an incisive interpretive profile.”

Carlin Romano | Chronicle of Higher Education

“[In] his intelligent and stimulating book. . . . Brown admirably balances respect for his subject with critical distance and persuasively makes the case that the ambiguousness of Hofstadter’s legacy is inseparable from his continuing interest. . . . At his best, Hofstadter remains vitally alive and endlessly instructive.”

Sam Tanenhaus | New York Times Book Review

"The most important political book of 2006 that is not a book about politics at all."

E.J. Dionne | Washington Post

"Hofstadters’s achievement, as the great historian of postwar liberalism, could hardly be a more perfect mirror of his age. As David Brown shows in his fascinating new study . . . Hofstadter’s life and times prepared him to be the kind of historian he was. Indeed, the sometimes unsettling insight that drives Mr. Brown’s book is that each generation of historians reads their own experience into the American past, turning historiography into a kind of biography."

Adam Kirsch | New York Sun

"A biography . . . that is not only a revelation, but also a fascinating read. Brown . . . has written an account worthy of Hofstadter himself: wry, humane, and illuminating. . . . Brown perceptively uses Hofstadter’s life as a lens through which to view the rise and fall of liberalism. It becomes clear from this book that Hofstadter was the first great historian of American conservatism, understanding like few on the left the grievances that have always animated America’s right wing."

Jacob Heilbrunn | Washington Monthly

"A truly fascinating story, and very much to the point . . . since Hofstadter’s private life did much to shape the content and thought behind his books. . . . Add to all this Brown’s analysis of each of Hofstadter’s important works, and his book makes for a remarkable tale, well-told, with relevance for our time."

Robert Leiter | Jewish Exponent

"Analytical and critical yet deeply appreciative of Hofstadter’s importance, Brown has written an elegant model study."

John David Smith | North Carolina Historical Review

"At a time when the strange interaction of economic discontents and social resentments yield wierd political furies . . . and the nation finds itself so patently ignorant of, and displaced in, the world at large (while still brandishing blunt power), Brown’s intellectual biography of Richard Hofstadter proves especially opportune."

Howard Brick | Belles Lettres

"Brown has undertaken the task of ’finding the man’ . . . and placing him within multiple contexts of American literary history, American historiography, American cultural history, American ethnic history generally, and American Jewish history particularly. He has succeeded in all his objectives and has produced a rich, skillfully written chronicle of a public intellectual."

Stuart E. Knee | The Historian

"Brown’s study provides a rewarding glimpse into the fascinating life--and a fine commentary on the enduring work--of the inimitable Richard Hofstadter."

James T. Kloppenberg | American Historical Review