Accessible and sound. A nice little introduction to the man and his work, providing context and explanation of his main ideas. Recommended for students and beginners.

Gareth Southwell is a philosopher, writer and illustrator.

When I last checked this comparatively short paperback was offered on Amazon.com for $35, and on Amazon.co,uk for £57, which begars belief: Amazon prithee: how can it be that you price such a short paperback book by a deceased author so expensively? Can demand be really that slim, given the worldwide fascination with the the book's subject, that the only way you can make a turn is at such a price?

That said, if, dear reader, you have any interest in the life and work of Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche and it is the best you can do, $35.00 is still a price worth paying for this superb volume (though, bargain hunters note: a second-hand copy from Amazon.com might be a better bet).

Reg Hollingdale was, with Walter Kaufman, largely responsible for resurrecting of Nietzsche's literary reputation in the latter half of last century, the philosopher's mendacious sister having fair ruined it soon after his death in 1900. Hollingdale - no tenured academic; in fact, a university dropout who put himself through German classes and worked on and off as a journalist) has translated all of Nietzsche's major works, the majority of which translation are still available in Penguin classics, together with his (altogether more reasonably priced!) A Nietzsche Reader, so his insight into the life and work of this philosopher was inevitably going to be a valuable one.

Even if you struggle with catching Nietzsche's drift (and be assured, you wouldn't be alone) you can still rejoice and marvel at Hollingdale's rendering in English of this most stylish of German writers - Hollingdale's articulation of the famous "Madman" passage from The Gay Science (which, by comparison, I have seen elsewhere translated more clumsily as "Joyful Wisdom") is a good example:

"... The madman sprang into their midst and pierced them with his glances. 'Where has God gone?' he cried. 'I shall tell you. We have killed him - you and I. We are his murderers. But how have we done this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What did we do when we unchained the earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving now? Away from all suns? Are we not perpetually falling? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there any up or down left? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing?"

In Nietzsche's celebrated difficulty lies the real beauty of Hollingdale's biography. This is a body of work which, 130 years later, is desperately in need of context. Hollingdale provides it. Each of Nietzsche's major works is addressed against the stage in his life at which it was written and is painstakingly extracted, analysed and interpreted to form a coherent picture of whole body of work. You get much of the content of the Nietzsche Reader within the pages of this work (a bargain at five times the price!)

Personally, I found this book a key which has unlocked the whole cabinet: Despite trying over many years, I'd never previously been able to assimilate the source material to my own satisfaction (with the possible exception of The Anti-Christ) and have only ever managed an impressionistic sense of Nietzsche's philosophy. His aphoristic style, while exhilarating, is not for the faint of heart: an expert guide such as Hollingdale's (or proper academic tuition) is pretty much obligatory. I feel fortified, now, to have another go.

Hollingdale's position, notwithstanding the many views to the contrary, is that while Nietzsche's philosophy evolved, matured and solidified as he grew older, it did not contradict itself or lack coherence, and any shifts in emphasis and content between his early works (such as Beyond Good and Evil ) and his later ones (up to, but probably excluding, Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One is) are a function of his growing out of an infatuation with Richard Wagner, and overcoming the philosophical limitations of Schopenhauer, by which he had formerly been impressed. Hollingdale paints a coherent and convincing account of a philosophy based on three main tenets: the intrinsic struggle and conflict which is central to all life, out of which flows his insistence on the primacy of the Will to Power and his rejection of Christianity as an instinctive denial of this conflicted but vital life force; the eternal recurrence, being (I think) a logical extension of the rejection of a prime mover, and also a pragmatic substitute for a God-given morality (Nietzsche's outlook is almost entirely the inverse of Janis Joplin's: live your life as if you would have to repeat it, identically, infinitely) and out of all of that the superman - he who can overcome himself and sublimate the Will to Power.

That this was, with his sister's complicity, wilfully misconstrued by some of the least appealing individuals to have ever walked the planet is unfortunate (far from being a putative supporter of the Third Reich, Nietzsche is repeatedly on record as intensely disliking the Germans in general and anti-semites in particular!) but thanks in large part to the work of the late Reg Hollingdale, that damage has largely been undone.

In the mean time, if you have any real interest in one of the most fascinating philosophers of all, $35 is arguably cheap at the price for your ticket. ( )