I like schizophrenic books, frequently, and enjoy tangents, and there are some highly interesting paragraphs about Spinoza's philosophy in this book, but there are also dozens of pages on the author's own childhood learning about Spinoza (not irrelevant, but not interesting enough to warrant the volume they get), waaaay too much speculation to establish the context of what Spinoza might have been exposed to, and to end the book, an imagined narrative of what Spinoza's life and thoughts may have been possibly like.