"Richard Wolin argued in Heidegger's Children that when Jewish writer Hannah Arendt forgave her former professor—and lover—Martin Heidegger for supporting the Nazis, she succumbed to misgivings about her own Jewishness and to resurgent amorous passions. But after carefully investigating the Arendt-Heidegger friendship, Maier-Katkin reaches a different conclusion. In Arendt's eventual reconciliation with her grievously erring mentor, he sees the culmination of a career of bravely independent thinking. Personal correspondence reveals the depth and persistence of Arendt's emotional attachment to Heidegger. But in her emergence as a public intellectual, she advances perspectives far from Heidegger's, as evidenced in her landmark study The Origins of Totalitarianism, where she dissects the phenomenon that absorbed her former teacher. But Maier-Katkin also recognizes her intellectual autonomy in her critique of Jewish Zionism as a dangerously ethnocentric movement and in her controversial characterization of Nazi Adolf Eichmann's crimes as 'the banality of evil.' It is indeed in the Eichmann epiphany that Arendt finds the surprising motivation to reconsider her ruptured relationship with Heidegger and consequently to extend to him the kind of world-embracing love that makes new beginnings possible. Readers welcoming diverse perspectives will benefit from this inquiry into a relationship uniquely freighted with historical meaning."—Booklist (starred review)