Archive

Book Reviews

10 June 2011

Cercas explains that he tried for two years to write the story of the events of 23 February as fiction, as an experimental version of The Three Musketeers, but that he foundered against the fact that the reality itself had become fictional: this was an event that everyone had listened to live on the radio, and later seen on television, and saw again each subsequent year on television. More…

Reading, Writing, and Publishing

11 February 2011

I suspect the chief reason we’ve taken to Bernhard in a way that surprises German-speakers is that we have long been accustomed to the great pleasures of what the English writer Geoff Dyer has called “the literature of neurasthenia, of anxiety, fretting, complaint.” New Yorkers are likely to identify this as the tradition that runs from Groucho Marx through Woody Allen, but Dyer sees it as equally English. More…

Book Reviews

28 October 2009

Crawford’s book, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work, describes the emotional and cerebral satisfactions of skilled manual labor; it is an attempt to restore dignity to, and propose renewed pedagogical emphasis on, such work in the softer, more circumspect era of the “knowledge economy.” More…

In Richard Rorty: The Making of an American Philosopher, the young sociologist Neil Gross has tried to use Rorty’s intellectual biography—his transformation from a philosopher working primarily within the narrow Anglophone analytic tradition to a digressive, itinerant intellectual on the model of his pragmatist hero, John Dewey—as a case study in an argument against certain kinds of piety. More…