Book

Buchan, James. Crowded with Genius: The Scottish Enlightenment; Edinburgh’s Moment of the Mind. HarperCollins, $29.95

Booklist: “spellbinding…an impressively sophisticated and multilayered cultural history.” Choice: “Buchan has written a particularly readable book…Endnotes and index are both ample and helpful. Recommended. All libraries.” Kirkus: “a lively portrait…If Buchan is a little imprecise on how Edinburgh eventually became a vital center of European civilization, he does a nice job of describing daily life among its intellectual set, of charting their ideas, and of evoking days gone by.” Publishers Weekly: “Buchan writes well and does a find job arguing the case…Yet much of this material has been covered before, most recently in Arthur Herman’s enjoyable How the Scots Invented the Modern World.” Library Journal: “novelist and critic Buchan…can make for dry and ponderous reading. This book will be of interest chiefly to serious students of Scottish history. Recommended for academic libraries and large public libraries with special collections in British history.”