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New Yorker
short take
John McPhee
This afternoon I chose to stay in rather than venture out into the thick, sweltering New York air. Having finished my work for the day, I picked up my copy of The John McPhee Reader and read excerpts from a few of his books—Oranges, A Roomful of Hovings and Other Portraits, and Pieces of the [...]
short take
“Odes to Old-fashioned Hard Work”
Matthew B. Crawford’s popular new book Shop Class as Soulcraft, which was excerpted in the New York Times Magazine, has received ample review attention. I’ve been surprised, though, by much of the criticism of the book, which seems to examine it in a vacuum. Distressingly few reviewers—Francis Fukuyama in the New York Times Book Review [...]
William Maxwell’s The Outermost Dream
The strongest impression I gathered from The Outermost Dream is one of an editor’s sensibility: ego suppression and attention to the delicate arrangement of material. Written with sympathy for and out of curiosity about his subjects—he avoided writing about fiction, choosing instead to discuss memoirs, correspondence, diaries, and biographies—Maxwell’s essays judiciously arrange for the reader the salient, character-summarizing facts of remarkable lives. [...]
George Steiner on scholarship, in a new collection of his essays
“It may well be that scholarship of the very first order is as rare as great art or poetry. Some of the gifts and qualities it exacts are obvious: exceeding concentration, a capacious but minutely precise memory, finesse and a sort of pious skepticism in the handling of evidence and sources, clarity of presentation.” [...]
Susan Jacoby’s Freethinkers
I’ve just finished Susan Jacoby’s 2004 book Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism, which I enjoyed reading. It is an account of freethought from Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason and Virginia’s 1786 Act for Establishing Religious Freedom to present-day battles between those supporting and fighting the teaching of evolution. The book’s tone remains fairly [...]
J. M. Coetzee: A brief comment and several reviews
(Photograph by Tony Cenicola for the New York Times) I have just completed the last book I will read this year: J.M. Coetzee’s new novel, Diary of a Bad Year. Each review of the book has of course discussed its three-stream or three-band structure. The first stream, at the top of the page, presents a [...]
