An utterly absorbing narrative of people, politics, and ideas, Louis Menand's The Metaphysical Club is "something very like a history of the American mind at work” (Alan Ryan, The New York Review of Books). Covering American history in the years between the civil war and the end of the First world war, Menand draws masterful portraits of four giants of American thought-Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., William James, Charles sanders Peirce, and John Dewey-whose ideas changed the way Americans think.