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Maybe someday
37
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
21/100Critics
53/100Scholars
Author:
Richard Wollheim, Sheila Heti
Publisher:
NYRB Classics
Date:
February 2, 2021
Germs is about first things, the seeds from which a life grows, as well as about the illnesses it incurs, the damage it sustains. Written at the end of his life by Richard Wollheim, one of the major philosophers of the late twentieth century, the book is not the usual story of growing up and getting on but a brilliant recovery and evocation of childhood consciousness and unconsciousness, an eerily precise rendering of that primitive, formative world we all come from in which we do not know either the world or ourselves for sure, and things--houses, clothes, meals, parents--loom large around us, as indispensable as they are out of our control.
What The Reviewers Say
In his radiant masterpiece Germs, Richard Wollheim presents us with a childhood that is understood [...] as a period to be survived only by stratagems.
Wollheim is a great noticer and maker of lists—the passage about his father’s possessions is exemplary—and another of Germs’s frequent pleasures comes from its psychogeography of suburbanism in the early days of that phenomenon.
Germs charts the growth of a self and a sensibility.
