Ladislas Löb's superb translation of Otto Weininger's highly controversial but enormously influential book is a most welcome contribution to understanding Vienna circa 1900 for readers who, for whatever reason, must approach Weininger via an English edition. It replaces what Wittgenstein termed a “beastly” anonymous translation published by Heinemann in England and G. P. Putnam's Sons in 1906 in the United States; the latter was reissued in 1975 by AMS Press and again as recently as 2003 by Howard Fertig. Approaching Weininger from that translation, one has the sense of being confronted with the work of a madman, who spins thoughts off the top of his head in a way that can only be described as absurd, so absurd that their very implausibility and contrariness have a way of making it into a fascinosum. To be sure, there is enough in Weininger's original to encourage that impression. It also helps to explain his appeal to half-educated fanatics like Dietrich Eckhart. Such a seriously defective edition, expurgated, bereft of one hundred thirty-five pages of notes and references and notoriously inaccurate, made it even more difficult than it otherwise might have been to understand how Weininger attracted the attention of brilliant thinkers and writers like Karl Kraus, Elias Canetti, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and even James Joyce (whose Ulysses, improbable as it seems, is deeply indebted to Weininger). In his Translator's Note, Löb provides numerous examples of absolutely grotesque mistranslations—in one place “es ist klar” is rendered as “it does not follow”—which more than corroborate the judgment Wittgenstein passed on the 1906 English edition. Löb neglects to mention, however, that English prudery seems to have dictated that all explicit references to orgasm be deleted. The expurgated version gives the impression of being a kind of misogynistic, anti-Semitic version of Peter Pan. Only a naïve, sensitive “boy genius” could have written such nonsense. In the end, camps formed on both sides about whether the author was a genius or a madman. Nobody, however, paid much attention to the argument—or the state of the text itself. This state of affairs has persisted until recently. Only in 1982 did it become known that there were two slightly different German editions of the work, and this only became widely known in the mid-1990s thanks to the assiduous research of Waltraud Hirsch (who is currently preparing an electronic critical edition of Weininger's complete works that should finally clear up the matter of the authoritative German text). Little wonder that there has been so much confusion surrounding Weininger.