Four Jews on Parnassus—A Conversation: Benjamin, Adorno, Scholem, Schönberg [With Music CD]

Carl Djerassi; Illustrations by Gabriele Seethaler

Share |

October, 2008
Cloth, 232 pages, 118 illus.
ISBN: 978-0-231-14654-8
$29.50 / £20.50

"A beautiful book." — Frederic Raphael, Times Literary Supplement

"The prodigiously illustrated book is a readable treatment of an important subject." — Booklist

"These four titular mid-20th century Jewish intellectuals from Germany and Austria come back to life with vigor." — Library Journal

"Reading this book was one of the most glorious experiences of my life. The writing is magnificent and appropriate both for reading and staging in a theater." — Susannah Heschel, Dartmouth College

"What is important is this book's originality. Carl Djerassi is highly innovative, amusing, and insightful. He is also not afraid to ask touchy questions. By writing a docudrama, he can and does raise questions about intellectual integrity and the personal integrity of 'godlike' intellectuals." — Jack Zipes, University of Minnesota

"Audaciously conceived and masterfully executed, Four Jews on Parnassus is more than a delightful jeu d'esprit. Combining serious research with a lively imagination, Carl Djerassi succeeds in evoking an entire lost world of human—all-too-human German Jewish intellectuals, whose chatter proves anything but idle." — Martin Jay, Sidney Hellman Ehrman Professor of History, University of California, Berkeley

Related Subjects

• Continental/Feminist Philosophy
• Judaism

About the Author

Carl Djerassi, novelist, playwright, and emeritus professor of chemistry at Stanford University, is one of the few American scientists to have been awarded both the National Medal of Science (for the first synthesis of an oral contraceptive) and the National Medal of Technology. He has published an autobiography, a memoir, a collection of short stories, a poetry chapbook, five novels, and eight plays that have been staged all over the world.

Gabriele Seethaler, an Austrian biochemist who became a photographer and artist, began to fuse art and science in a project entitled Identity Genotype-Phenotype. The Viennese Gallery Heike Curtze has shown her work since 2000.

top of page