… Readers seeking a fuller picture of the thought and its context must turn to Ray Monk's 1990 biography, which still has the best balance of context, exposition and anecdote. But Gottlieb's more selective treatment, precisely because it doesn't try to say everything, illuminates everything it touches: Wittgenstein's restiveness, his ambivalent Jewishness and how much, despite his years in Britain, he remained a creature of Vienna.
Gottlieb does not accept Wittgenstein at his own estimation. Whatever the man may have grandly declared, his work "was not an end to traditional philosophizing but a highly personal continuation of it." In showing us a philosopher shaped as much by the musical salons of the "Palais Wittgenstein" — the local name for the family's sumptuous townhouse — as by Cambridge logic, Gottlieb makes a quiet case for including this most reluctant of Jewish lives, a man who could never quite escape the Vienna he left, nor the heritage he spent his life both denying and confessing.
Like its subject's later philosophy, this book finds clarity not through ambitious systematic claims but through careful attention to particulars — and in those particulars, we glimpse not just a more Jewish Wittgenstein, but a more human one.
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