Who is the greatest living essayist writing in English? Unquestionably Joseph Epstein. Epstein is penetrating. He is witty. He has a magic touch with words, that hard to define but immediately recognizable quality called style. Above all, he is impossible to put down. How easy it is today to forget the simple delight of reading for no intended purpose. Each of the 39 pieces in this book is a pure pleasure to read.

Donated by John M. McCaffrey.

Americans :George Washington ; Henry Adams and Henry James ; George Santayana ; Adlai Stevenson ; Henry Luce ; Ralph Ellison ; Isaac Rosenfeld ; Saul Bellow ; Bernard Malamud ; Dwight Macdonald ; Gore Vidal ; Irving Howe ; Alfred Kazin ; Irving Kristol ; Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. ; A.J. Liebling ; John Frederick Nims ; Susan Sontag -- Englishmen : Max Beerbohm ; George Eliot ; Maurice Bowra ; T.S. Eliot ; Cyril Connolly ; Isaiah Berlin ; Hugh Trevor-Roper ; John Gross -- Popular culture : Alfred Kinsey ; Charles Van Doren ; W.C. Fields ; Irving Thalberg ; George Gershwin ; Joe DiMaggio ; Michael Jordan ; James Wolcott ; Malcolm Gladwell -- And other : Erich Heller ; Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn ; V.S. Naipaul and Paul Theroux ; Xenophon ; Matthew Shanahan.