Francesca Slovin's The Last Walk is a rare and beautiful work that combines psychological understanding, deep personal sympathy, and profound philosophical grounding with historical truth into a narrative of great illuminating power. Slovin's account of Rousseau's long last walk provides a deeply satisfying re-imagining of the man, his ideas, and his tangled loyalties to those closest to him and to the ideas that propelled both him and the history of the West.
--Jonathan Brent, Yale University Press
Francesca Cemia Slovin's book is the passionate and meticulously researched recreation of the last walk taken by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the self-described "solitary walker." Superbly written and crafted, The Last Walk weaves marvellously back and forth between the "reveries" of this great thinker-tormented by paranoia, at once hallucinatory and justified- and those of the women and men closest to him: lovers, friends, and enemies. This is an outstanding contribution to our understanding of Rousseau and his time, the precise instant that both separates and unites Enlightenment, Revolution, and Romanticism. We have the uncanny sense that Rousseau is talking to himself nearing death and yet to us, in our own deeply troubled times. I have never read a finer fusion of profound philosophy, brute historical fact, and thrilling suspense fiction. The Last Walk is an extraordinary-and most timely-achievement.
-Geoffrey Waite (Comparative Literature, Cornell University)
