Betraying Spinoza

Hilary Putnam has a lovely short piece at the New York Observer on Rebecca Goldstein's Betraying Spinoza. I got this and also The Mind-Body Problem in September but they immediately joined the huge stacks of books I have acquired without having time to read in the last four months or so; however the second has already migrated into the "read next" location (i.e. sort of buried in the part of my bed I do not sleep in... too much information!), and now this one will also. I have irrationally avoided reading Rebecca Goldstein because of a strong feeling that she is exactly the kind of writer I aspire to become myself, and that there might be something inhibiting about seeing such a thing in practice, but now I'm ready to do it (ready, that is, once I've done temporarily with work).