A very poor book
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This is a truly terrible book. I was immensely disappointed. How it got past the editors I don't know. Aczel repeatedly tells us that someone or other was a genius, that he utterly transformed the way we think, etc., without ever explaining what actually was achieved. This is just bad writing. It is schematic in its presentation of ideas, shying away from any real engagement. Most things seem passed on second hand and without any real confidence. Either he knows very little about structuralism or he is deliberately insulting the intelligence of his readership. There's a fair amount of biographical information of the people associated with Bourbaki, but even here Aczel manages to aggravate by producing an almost identical paragraph on each the main players: born here, to parents X & Y, went to school here, to university there... This gets very repetitive. For a great deal of information he relies heavily on a few sources (not least the excellent Histoire du structuralisme by Francois Dosse), suggesting a rather limited amount of background research. This book was clearly written in a big hurry. I'd save yourself a little time and leave it well alone.
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