W.E.B. Du Bois has received much scholarly attention. As the individual who presciently noted that “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line,” and who popularized “the talented tenth and “double-consciousness,” it is not surprising that Du Bois's life and work have inspired multiple readings—including multiple touches by the same scholar. Perhaps Du Bois's continuing allure stems from his endless complexity and seeming contradictions. Tracing this public intellectual's career requires consideration of his upbringing in Great Barrington, Massachusetts in the years following the Civil War and Reconstruction, his college years at Fisk and Harvard, and—as Appiah reminds the reader—his years of study in Germany between 1892 and 1894. Appiah's Lines of Descent grows out of the W.E.B. Du Bois lectures he gave in 2010. His thesis is a simple, yet challenging one: Du Bois's time in Germany was a watershed in his intellectual development, one crucial for understanding the man and his times.

Appiah begins the narrative in 1958—sixty-six years after Du Bois's first arrival in Germany—by describing the accolades showered upon Du Bois at the University of Berlin upon his triumphant return. Lines of Descent, while small in size, is huge in scope, and the book's subtitle: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Emergence of Identity, is not the overstatement it first appears to be. Du Bois is the story's point of origin and primary vehicle, but he is not its only subject. The book is also a brief introduction to nineteenth-century German philosophy: a topic that Appiah humbly admits to having known little about before revisiting the subject of Du Bois in Germany, but one he now considers essential knowledge. In addition to German philosophy, Appiah traces Du Bois's physical and intellectual journey to Europe focusing on German political economy and historical study; the bustling German sociopolitical and economic context in the 1890s; and global notions of race, nation, and identity in Europe, the United States, and Africa. These are massive subjects in their own right, requiring that the reader approach them with a good deal of background.

Appiah's introduction paints a picture of the German socio-intellectual context upon Du Bois's arrival while placing Du Bois squarely in the frame. But immediately, this intellectual history rejects a strictly linear reading of intellectual “lines of descent.” Re-creating the intellectual ferment in Germany, Appiah opens: “But it will be salutary to begin with a note of caution. Although it is common enough to discuss intellectual genealogies, that metaphor is perhaps too determinate—in the mode of those biblical catalogs of begats—to capture the ferment of the mind…” (4). Drawing upon both the hard and social sciences, Appiah continues: “I'm more drawn to a model suggested by the sociologist Robert K. Merton's work on what he called ‘multiples’ in the history of science—independent, simultaneous discoveries of the same thing turn out to be the rule, rather than the exception—and by his notion of the matrix of discovery (4). These matrices established, Lines of Descent promises a more inclusive cast of characters. Without dismissing teacher-to-student transmission, Appiah continues:

The remainder of the introduction introduces Du Bois's noted preoccupation with race theory, his physical/intellectual movement back to the United States—to Harvard, Wilberforce, and Atlanta Universities—and his formative work with the NAACP. It also begins analysis of Du Bois's Souls of Black Folk (1903) as a product of the German strife/striving (streben). Subsequent chapters develop the thesis both individually and collectively.

Appiah explores place and theory in three chapters framed in geographic terms. The first chapter briefly returns to Du Bois's arrival and early experiences in Germany, unpacking the richness that was the University of Berlin in 1892. Appiah repeatedly asserts that not only was Du Bois exposed to many intellectual giants—as he would also be in the United States—but that he was exposed to intellectuals who desired to practice the very theories they debated in college classrooms: “And so the Historical School represented a union between the political engagement and a just-the-facts approach to social and economic history” (33).

Next, Appiah turns to how Du Bois came to formulate questions of race and nation while in Germany. Appiah probes the impact of German Romanticism on Du Bois's nationalism and humanistic outlook. Souls, in this reading, becomes an examination of a global tragedy, not just an American one. German thinkers such as Heinrich von Treitschke, Adolf Wagner, and Gustav Von Schmoller who taught Du Bois to “resist methodological individualism” (76) join Josiah Royce, George Herbert Palmer, William James, George Santayana, and others as Du Bois's intellectual sources. These dual intellectual communities contributed to Du Bois's ability to alternatively speak individually and collectively about racial identity and the color line in a manner he describes interestingly as “Du Bois' disciplinary schizophrenia…” (79).

Chapter 3, finally, heads to Africa. Essentially, Du Bois intellectually arrives in Africa as early as the 1890s during his study in Germany, years before actually traveling there (1923). Again Appiah's work on the concept of cosmopolitan comes through. He rightfully labels W.E.B. Du Bois as a pioneer in the adoption of a more nuanced, sociocultural construction of race, and memorably characterizes race as a unicorn. Yet with linguistic flair, Appiah relates that Du Bois never lost sight of the very real implications of race for people of color: “The concept of race might be a unicorn, but its horn could draw blood” (113). Readers familiar with Appiah's earlier analysis of Du Bois's (more rigid, biologically based) racial thinking in In My Father's House (1992) will find this a very different reading. Chapter 4 continues analysis of the significance of Africa for Du Bois, beginning with Du Bois's admittedly limited knowledge of what was then largely considered the “Dark Continent.” Appiah concludes that Du Bois's education in Germany prepared him to reconsider Africa (122–123). The final chapter, heavy on the philosophy, uses the expansion of Du Bois's knowledge of Africa as a link to broader questions including Ernest Renan's and Benedict Anderson's and George Herbert Mead's findings on nation, memory, history, community, and the development of identity.

The book's shortcomings come perhaps in its inability to deliver on the promise of those Mertonian matrices introduced at the outset. For example, although Harvard is juxtaposed with Germany as a key intellectual influence, another central theme—that Du Bois's activist tendencies were awakened by the key German professors who were also active politically—might cause those familiar with Du Bois's experiences in the United States to counter that Du Bois's time at Fisk (and time spent teaching in rural Tennessee), or Du Bois's time in Atlanta and his encounters with lynching and the Atlanta Riot equally impacted his politicization. It may come off as if Germany was the only watershed in Du Bois's intellectual and political development; yet, neither Appiah, nor anyone equally familiar with Du Bois, would make such a claim. The book's strength is that it pushes one to rethink Du Bois as Du Bois consistently rethought race, nation, and identity.

Since the book's introduction explicitly prioritizes fully re-creating Du Bois's early intellectual matrix, one might be disappointed that this matrix is essentially limited to Germany. Yet this is the text's focus. Like the cosmopolitanism that Appiah has described here and elsewhere, being a “citizen of the world” requires a particular social and intellectual engagement with that world. And often the best way to analyze one's “home” is to step outside its borders in order to view that home with some perspective. As Appiah remarks, “W.E.B. Du Bois never felt so at home as when he was a student at the University of Berlin.” Appiah approaches his subject with humility, reverence, and respect. He discusses Du Bois as a German intellectual—not just an American, or African American one. Appiah's Lines of Descent—an outgrowth of philosophical interest, German historiography, and recent work on the study of identity—accomplishes this goal and encourages the rereading of the many other Du Bois biographies, allowing interested readers to see W.E.B. Du Bois in a new light.