From the back flap: An utterly absorbing narrative of people, politics, and ideas. Lous Menand's book is "something very like a history of the American mind at word". Covering American history in years between the Civil War and the end of the first World War, Menand draws masterful protrais of four giants of American thought - Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., William James, Charles Sanders Peirce and Joh Dewey - whose ideas changed the way Americans think. Anybody interested in modern American will find rewards aplenty in this book.