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Everything In Life Is Arbitrary Yet Must Be Over-determined In Literature. Jean Mcgarry Knows How To Tell A Persuasive Tale Illuminating These Truths.

Reading The Very Best Writers—let Us Say Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Tolstoy—is Not Going To Make Us Better Citizens. Art Is Perfectly Useless, According To The Sublime Oscar Wilde, Who Was Right About Everything. He Also Told Us That All Bad Poetry Is Sincere. Had I The Power To Do So, I Would Command That These Words Be Engraved Above Every Gate At Every University, So That Each Student Might Ponder The Splendor Of The Insight.

You Know, I Don't Want To Be Offensive. But 'infinite Jest' [regarded By Many As Wallace's Masterpiece] Is Just Awful. It Seems Ridiculous To Have To Say It. He Can't Think, He Can't Write. There's No Discernible Talent.

I Have Read All Of Daniel Aaron's Books, And Admired Them, But In The Americanist I Believe He Has Composed An Intellectual And Social Memoir For Which He Will Be Remembered. His Self-portrait Is Marked By Personal Tact And Admirable Restraint: He Is And Is Not Its Subject. The Americanist Is A Vision Of Otherness: Literary And Academic Friends And Acquaintances, Here And Abroad. Eloquently Phrased And Free Of Nostalgia, It Catches A Lost World That Yet Engendered Much Of Our Own.

More Even Than Southern Presbyterians And Southern Methodists, The Baptists Provided The Great Mass Of Confederate Enlisted Men.