.

But he always claimed his perspective was a 'view from afar', enabling him to deliver incisive and subversive diagnoses of our waning modernity.

Loyer's outstanding biography tells the story of a true intellectual adventurer whose unforgettable voice invites us to rethink questions of the human and the meaning of progress.

Anthropologists interested in the background to Lévi-Strauss’s work will be able to dip in and out of the book as needed. Both anthropologists were nice Jewish boys from nurturing, close-knit extended families. Overall then, Lévi-Strauss’s academic diplomacy seems to have more in common with the conciliatory institutional politicking of Raymond Firth (another of his near-contemporaries) than with Boas.

Loyer portrays aspects of Lévi-Strauss’s career that may be unfamiliar to some readers.

Trying to contextualize this panorama of players would be a nightmare, and Loyer opts to spend little time providing readers with background. This detailed, deeply researched, and relatively accessible volume makes it difficult to imagine that anyone will attempt a more exhaustive biography in the future. Even his private life presents a challenge: Lévi-Strauss lived much of his life in his study, making most of his biography too uneventful to make for interesting reading.

Additional and often-juicy details can be found in the endnotes, which specialists will enjoy but are not necessary to the narrative. In fact, Lévi-Strauss seems to have achieved his position of prominence to ensure that he would be free to write whatever he wanted. She also documents Lévi-Strauss’s opposition to the (successful) election of Marguerite Yourcenar to the Académie Française, the first woman to serve on that body.

The defining force in French anthropology after World War II, an internationally-known intellectual, and a—many would argue the—founder of structuralism, Lévi-Strauss left an indelible mark on the intellectual culture of the twentieth century. In fact, Lévi-Strauss’s father was a skilled portrait painter and one of the highlights of the book is his portrayal of a four-year-old Claude in a dress riding a toy horse.

Luckily Loyer does not seem captured by familial interests and is candid about controversial aspects of Lévi-Strauss’s life.

These good-but-thick volumes have had mixed success in terms of readability. Loyer conducted research in four countries for this work and draws heavily on the secondary literature in French and English as well.

One cannot just search for “Roman Jakobsen,” but instead must know that his meeting with Jakobsen was “fabled” and go to entries beginning with F in the Lévi-Strauss index entry for “fabled encounter with Roman Jakobsen.” (The entry for Jakobsen does not have a separate entry for this event.) I would have preferred a listing in narrative order as in, for instance, Young’s Malinowskior Stocking’s After Tylor.

I am sure many reviewers will compliment her on her mastery of the sources but to be honest, very few of us have mastered them sufficiently to judge her.