Reception
The book was well received overall, earning largely favorable reviews in the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Nature (from Peter Lipton), The New Republic (from Richard Rorty) and New Scientist. Friend and student of Feyerabend Sheldon J. Reaven hailed the autobiography as "delightful" and "revealing", while a reviewer in Contemporary Sociology found the book "by turns charming and infuriating". Prolific reviewer Danny Yee called it "an engaging autobiography of an intriguing individual who lead an eventful life", and remarked that the book could be appreciated by readers uninterested in philosophy of science or who had never heard of Feyerabend. Kirkus Reviews described it as "a fascinating memoir with an ending that will change many people's opinion about the Peck's bad boy of philosophy". The New York Times Book Review gave the article an "A-" grade, with reviewer Nancy Maull commenting that "There is much to admire and much to frustrate admiration in the account. But in his instructive, stubborn and unbending refusal to be dazzled by theory, still has no rival."
Read more about this topic: Killing Time (book)
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“He’s leaving Germany by special request of the Nazi government. First he sends a dispatch about Danzig and how 10,000 German tourists are pouring into the city every day with butterfly nets in their hands and submachine guns in their knapsacks. They warn him right then. What does he do next? Goes to a reception at von Ribbentropf’s and keeps yelling for gefilte fish!”
—Billy Wilder (b. 1906)
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)
“But in the reception of metaphysical formula, all depends, as regards their actual and ulterior result, on the pre-existent qualities of that soil of human nature into which they fall—the company they find already present there, on their admission into the house of thought.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)