Life's too short for lots of things, and this book is one of them. It doesn't get around to explaining what the vienna circle was, or why I should care. There are some amusing anecdotes about some neat people, but the majority of it is banal discussions of their early lives, the girls they dated, and such blither. What's worse is Sigmund is an English professor, and needs to prove it by writing in a style so affected it actually pained me to read. ( )

Only 45 pages in, but I'm loving it so much I'm 5-starring it now. I have a science background (physics) but not enough education in the stories of science, and this one is great: Ernst Mach, Boltzmann, Wittgenstein, Vienna, the coffeehouses.

I went to the bibliography hoping for more books to pursue, but the sources I saw there were German, out of my league. But that's just another reason to thank the author for writing this story for the likes of me. ( )