For a hundred years Martin Buber has been read with bowed heads. The gentle prophet of dialogue, the bearded sage who taught a tired century to say “Thou,” he became the conscience of a people and the symbol of an age. His slim book I and Thou is quoted everywhere and examined almost nowhere. This is the examination it never received.

I and Thou and Nothing Else is a critical life of the man behind the icon—a biography that doubles as a detective story. It grants Buber every advantage. It lets him rise out of Galicia and the rubble of post-war Europe, charismatic and dignified, and it listens to him with care. Then it does the one thing reverence forbade: it reads him closely, line by line, and watches the structure dissolve into rhythm, the argument into incantation, the concept into a beautiful and empty gesture.

Here is the famous tree that scolds anyone who dares to study it. Here is the “basic word” that forbids analysis by refusing to mean anything analyzable. Here, at the book’s center, is a farce performed with a straight face—a demonstration that any pair of pronouns can be inflated into a metaphysics richer than his. And here, too, is the refusal of an easy victory: the Hasidic tales he saved, the Scripture he helped translate, the prophetic hunch that a self is born in the act of meeting another. The verdict is exact and double-edged. It was good that he wished to philosophize. It was bad that he philosophized badly.

A book about clarity disguised as a book about one man, this is a defense of thinking itself against the soft and flattering fog that keeps mistaking itself for depth.