More than half a century after Perry Miller explored the traditions of the “New England mind,” intellectual historians and literary scholars are still preoccupied with this somewhat nebulous entity, although it now appears in a less homogeneous form. In this suggestive study, Andrew Taylor interrogates five major figures: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, William James, and George Santayana. The stated aim is to think “about the location and responsibilities” of this “specific strand of American intellectual life,” against a backdrop of cultural change in which the concept of the intellectual as a social type itself emerged (4). In doing so, Taylor reexamines the problems of identification faced not only by these New England thinkers and writers, but by intellectuals at large. This lends a contemporary slant to the analysis, with lines drawn between Emerson's self-liberating transcendentalism and such recent examples as Edward Said's conception of the alienated intellectual, outside any national culture. Taylor stops short of claiming a simple intellectual genealogy between Emerson and the present, however. Instead, he seeks to unravel recurring, problematic, questions: how can ideas be translated into actions? How should thinkers preoccupied with universal truths relate to entities such as the community, or the nation? The careful choice of writers, texts, and biographical episodes amply justifies this intervention in the long-running conversation about the status of the intellectual. In Thoreau's complex engagement with John Brown as a visionary radical a provocative model of the transgressive intellectual-as-terrorist emerges. Engaging in thoughtful ways with Fuller's Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1843), Taylor allows her infectious cosmopolitanism and social engagement to come to the fore; if any New England intellectual managed to make the leap from thought to action, surely it was Fuller. James, despite his reputation for a hearty pluralism, is shown to insist upon the limits of cosmopolitanism, wary of America's lapse into cultural incoherence. Thus, against many competing characterizations, James is recast by Taylor in a more conventionally Victorian mould, as “a gentleman reformer whose idea of modest hierarchy is always in danger of slipping into cultural elitism” (157). The Spanish-born Harvard philosopher Santayana, who abandoned the United States in 1911, provides a final critical perspective on the intellectual life of New England, ultimately dismissing Emerson's transcendentalism as “a belated romanticism” (173). Throughout the book Taylor sets these five figures into conversations with a parade of more recent thinkers who have covered similar terrain, from Gramsci and Arendt to Bourdieu and (especially) Cavell, among many others. This gives Thinking America the feel of a particularly high-powered seminar: sometimes prone to digression, but with a superabundance of critical opinions and insightful interpretations on offer. Some of Taylor's suggestions could have been developed further, particularly about the embedding of intellectual life in a professionalizing university culture which formed the increasingly dominant “scene of instruction.” Yet the overall effect is impressive and energizing, and serves as a persuasive reminder of the continued relevance to contemporary concerns of these largely familiar figures in American intellectual history.