jmoran4 's review for:

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
5.0

Perhaps the greatest novel ever written, reaching beyond the liberal/individualist trappings of the novel form and producing a theory of history and human action, not too far removed from the materialism of the new Hegelians. The novel's dramatic components are great too, of course: the characters, setting, narrative execution, spectacular adaptation of historical events. But what sets War and Peace apart is its philosophical musings later on in the book, where it pulls the reader away from the narrative to consider the difficult of narrativization as such.