The book is fairly well-written and Nieman is a good philosopher, introducing me to a few ideas I'll hold onto (my favorite chapter was on the relationship between is/ought and being an adult). However, this book was wildly unpersuasive in its over-the-top Kant (and to a lesser extent Rousseau) apologetics. One of the chief maneuvers repeated throughout the book is to bring up a Kantian-infused concept (e.g., autonomy, judgment), and then run ahead of the discussion to fend off common criticisms, but only those that can be quickly dismissed as actually engaging the more substantive critiques would be out of place (but, then again, so is the extent of the defensiveness). If you took her word for it, almost anything Kant got wrong couldn't have been reasonably foreseen/understood at the time. Moreover, Kant's critics--apparently--reliably mischaracterize and ad hominem him oh so unjustly. An unsuspecting reader might understandably think of Kant as some neglected and misunderstood figure in need of a champion rather than as a titan in the field with respected academic journals *entirely* devoted to studying his ideas. I'll out myself as an admitted non-Kantian but, like most professional philosophers I know, I see Kant as obviously a great philosopher who I regularly taught as a professor.* That said, the author's near breathless defenses of the man are one of the main reasons I wouldn't recommend this book to someone.

Unsurprisingly, then, I would have enjoyed the book much more without the Kant and Rousseau hype. For such a short book, all of the "people say X but that's not quite true because Y and, and, besides, Z!" defenses of the two figures was not a good use of space. I actually enjoyed the parts where Nieman herself was theorizing, but the book had far too little of this. In addition, if I were a friend giving edits, I'd say cut a lot of the contemporary political asides as these usually distracted from the main point and added little beyond apparent signaling effects. If you do share her politics, then the asides are too brief to add depth to the relevant ideas; and, if you don't share her politics, the asides are surely unpersuasive and take the reader out of considering the larger points under discussion. Toward the end of the book Neiman talked about how much she enjoyed researching it, and I believe her. But while I did get some things out of the book and don't regret reading it, I think she should have deployed her own fine writing and deep knowledge of history of philosophy differently.

*And this is in spite of the fact that students reliably complain about having to read him because of his poor writing style, the latter judgment being a point that Neiman recognizes upfront in the book but does her utmost to explain away.