Claude Lévi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory

Patrick Wilcken

Penguin Press

416 Pages, $ 29.95

The first English language biography of Claude Lévi- Strauss which recreates his peripatetic life in rich detail: his groundbreaking fieldwork in some of the remotest reaches of the Amazon in the 1930s; his years as a Jew in Nazi-occupied France and as an émigré in wartime New York; and his return to Paris in the late 1940s, where he clashed with Jean-Paul Sartre and fundamentally influenced fellow postwar thinkers from Jacques Lacan to Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes.