Daniel Maier-Katkin is a scholar, and it shows. He is riveting about Hannah Arendt’s ideas and the trouble they brought her, and provides a clear and useful summary of the debate about Heidegger. But about the relationship between the two – their love affair before the war, and their reconciliation and friendship after – he is clumsy and naive. Perhaps the publishers wanted something more than an intellectual biography. He should have resisted. 

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