There is much to be commended in this short book--Brann offers helpful interpretations and reinterpretations of Heraclitean fragments, as well as correctly identifies Heraclitus' Logos as a fundamentally agonistic relation (hence "War is the Father of all things"), that both creates, maintains, and requires tension & strife. She correctly attributes features of Socrates' dialectic to core Heraclitean insights, and acknowledges that Hegel must have recognized (and utilized) the power of his ontological paradoxes.

She goes wrong when she counter-intuitively argues that Heraclitus is incorrectly read as a "flux" philosopher, and would be better paired with his contemporary Parmenides, who famously claimed that "All is one." While I wouldn't disagree that Heraclitus stands in relation (per the Logos) to Parmenides' declaration, I do not think the One of Parmenides is the same One that Heraclitus speaks of. Instead of denying the flux (change, agonism, strife) that is at the core of Heraclitus' fragments, she could have pushed Hegel's conclusions further, and found Heraclitus' true descendant in Adorno and his Negative Dialectics, which does not seek to reconcile opposites into an untrue unity. ( )

Brann illuminates and injects with many meanings the surviving fragments of Heraclitus. It took awhile to get into the linguistic circumscription philosophical technique being used, but in the end it does seem warranted. Whether Heraclitus actually meant for Logos to play the role of stable opposition and unifier of ratios or it is just Brann telling that story through his fragments is secondary to the fact that this is a deep meditative reading. ( )