Robert Nozick, the Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University, always attacks his problems in a disconcertingly original way. … in The Examined Life, he took on nothing less than the meaning of life, a subject that academic philosophers tended to steer clear of — and still do, despite his best efforts. From Mr. Nozick you always expect fireworks, even if some of them go off in their box. His questions, hints, counterarguments and suggestions come so thick and fast that it is next to impossible to appreciate all of them. Start pondering a sentence and you will find yourself led away prematurely by a parenthetical question; think about the question and you will be dragged into a discursive footnote; from the bowels of the footnote, another parenthetical query will leap out at you. If you escape back to the main argument with your concentration intact (unlikely, after a while), the whole wearing business just starts over again. Yet it is worth the effort — certainly for regular readers of philosophy, and often for others.