I first read Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass in 2005, on the 150th anniversary of its publication, and I must confess that it confused me unlike any poetic work I had yet read. Shakespeare, Tennyson, Keats, Poe – these were the poets […]
David Herbert Donald’s Lincoln
by on September 19, 2013
David Herbert Donald’s Lincoln, a one-volume biography of America’s 16th and most celebrated president, has been deservedly praised beyond what meager tribute I could hope to offer. I will content myself by saying that this book is a labor of love, […]
Alan Sokol & Jean Bricmont’s Fashionable Nonsense
by on September 13, 2013
In 1996, Alan Sokol published a paper in the prestigious academic journal Social Text arguing that quantum gravity is a “social and linguistic construct,” less a fact about the universe than an opinion or perspective, and one requiring “feminist and poststructuralist deconstruction” […]
Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer
by on August 29, 2013
First, some words on Eric Hoffer. He was born in 1902 in the Bronx, the child of poor German immigrants. By the age of five, he learned to read in both English and German, but one day, while carrying him […]
Donald Barthelme’s Forty Stories
by on August 20, 2013
Donald Barthelme is perhaps one of America’s most influential unread authors. He is not often canonized in “best of” lists, rarely named as someone’s favorite writer, and yet his influence over fiction in America is undeniable. His short stories have […]
Thomas Sowell’s Black Rednecks And White Liberals
by on August 15, 2013
Thomas Sowell is something of an iconoclast, but in the best possible way. He is ferociously intelligent, erudite in more disciplines than many can master in a lifetime, and articulate, in speech and writing, to a degree that causes me […]
Sigmund Freud’s Civilization And Its Discontents
by on August 11, 2013
Civilization And Its Discontents, although among the last of Freud’s output, remains amongst his most influential and widely read works, probably because it does not stand or fall on Freudian psychoanalytic theory but can profitably be read as a philosophical […]
John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty
by on August 1, 2013
John Stuart Mill was one of the 19th century’s most important philosophers and a paragon of academic devotion and moral rigor. He wrote extensively on the social issues of the day, particularly on slavery and women’s rights, and defended his […]
Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies
by on July 26, 2013
Evelyn Waugh was a British journalist and author known for his biting social satire and his unfortunate personal failings (racist, elitist, fascist sympathizer…the list is long). Nevertheless, he remains one of the great English comic writers and his second novel, Vile […]
George Saunders’ The Braindead Megaphone
by on July 22, 2013
George Saunders’ The Braindead Megaphone is a collection of (largely) non-fiction essays collected from publications like GQ and The New Yorker. This is Saunders’ first non-fiction collection, but I doubt it will be his last: the formula is to take work for which an author […]
Paul Mariani’s The Broken Tower: The Life Of Hart Crane
by on July 19, 2013
I arrived at Mariani’s biography courtesy of Harold Bloom, who of all living critics must surely have the deepest and most abiding love for Hart Crane, having discovered him when he was only ten years old. Crane is a haunting […]
William Giraldi’s Busy Monsters
by on July 15, 2013
I have fallen in love with William Giraldi. I discovered him haphazardly during an insomnia-fueled whirlwind tour of literary blogs I frequent. Amidst the usual detritus was an essay entitled “Letter to a Young Critic,” which gave me the uncomfortable […]
Paul Robeson
by on July 9, 2013
Paul Robeson may very well be the most talented man you have never heard of. He was a professional football player, internationally recognized star of stage and screen, civil rights advocate of high moral principle and remarkably little regard for […]
Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep
by on July 5, 2013
Raymond Chandler published The Big Sleep, his first novel, in 1939, when he was already 50 years old, but that did not stop him from revitalizing the detective story and inventing a new genre, gritty and dark and cynical. Cinephiles use […]
Franz Kafka’s The Castle
by on July 3, 2013
The Castle is one of Kafka’s three unfinished novels and, together with The Trial and “The Metamorphosis,” widely regarded as his masterwork. The plot, in brief: a man named K., a land surveyor by trade, is called into a village at the behest […]