The Deadline: Essays

by Jill Lepore

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

From the highly political to the intensely personal, this collection sets the standard for the beloved art form that is the essay. Lepore deftly explores various touchpoints in the American societal landscape, adding to the ongoing narrative of what this country really is, and what it’s meant to be.

"Jill Lepore is unquestionably one of America’s best historians; it’s fair to say she’s one of its best writers too." —Jonathan Russell Clark, Los Angeles Times

Best Books of 2023: New Yorker, TIME

A book to be read and kept for posterity, The Deadline is the art of the essay at its best.

Few, if any, historians have brought such insight, wisdom, and empathy to public discourse as Jill Lepore. Arriving at The New Yorker in 2005, Lepore, with her panoptical range and razor-sharp style, brought a transporting freshness and a literary vivacity to everything from profiles of long-dead writers to urgent constitutional analysis to an unsparing scrutiny of the woeful affairs of the nation itself. The astonishing essays collected in The Deadline offer a prismatic portrait of Americans’ techno-utopianism, frantic fractiousness, and unprecedented—but armed—aimlessness. From lockdowns and race commissions to Bratz dolls and bicycles, to the losses that haunt Lepore’s life, these essays again and again cross what she calls the deadline, the “river of time that divides the quick from the dead.” Echoing Gore Vidal’s United States in its massive intellectual erudition, The Deadline, with its remarkable juxtaposition of the political and the personal, challenges the very nature of the essay—and of history—itself.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781631496127
Publisher:	Liveright Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	08/29/2023
Pages:	640
Sales rank:	30,942
Product dimensions:	6.50(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.70(d)

About the Author

Jill Lepore is the David Kemper ’41 Professor of American History at Harvard University and a staff writer at The New Yorker. A two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, her many books include the international bestseller These Truths and If Then, which was longlisted for the National Book Award.

Editorial Reviews

"Bright, crisp, inventive, surprising, and a constant delight."

New York Journal of Books - Joseph Barbato

"[A] bracing and deeply considered guide to the ground-shifting cultural and political events of the past 10 years."

WBUR - Carol Iaciofano Aucoin

"Reading Lepore on the Second and 14th Amendments (any amendment, really) is elucidating. But it’s her inclinations toward misfits and old narratives we have taken for granted that make The Deadline glow . . . the book emerges as a riveting survey of America, a vital reminder that 'history isn’t a pledge, it’s an argument.'"

Sloane Crosley

"Dazzling . . . Whether the subject is technology, law, culture, bicycling or children, her insights hold our attention."

BookPage

★ 2023-05-02
Shrewd perspectives on a tumultuous decade.

In intellectually rigorous essays lightened with “domestic metaphors” and “maternal asides,” historian Lepore brings her vibrant curiosity and wide-ranging erudition to a host of topics, including Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Barbie and Bratz dolls, bicycles, VW buses, and Moby-Dick. While most essays appeared over the past 10 years in the New Yorker, where Lepore is a staff writer, two have never been published: “The Everyman Library,” which pays homage to her father and grandfather; and “The Return of the Pervert,” from 2018, in which Lepore critiques the narrowness of the #MeToo movement. Many essays reverberate far beyond the events that inspired them. For example, “Battleground America,” from 2012, begins with a school shooting in Ohio and expands to consider the history of the Second Amendment, the murder of Trayvon Martin, the National Rifle Association’s rise and vociferous interpretation of the meaning of an armed militia, and the organization’s moneyed lobbying of politicians, which has repeatedly thwarted gun safety legislation. “When carrying a concealed weapon for self-defense is understood not as a failure of civil society, to be mourned, but as an act of citizenship, to be vaunted, there is little civilian life left,” writes the author. Sprightly essays on technology are informed by firsthand reporting and deep research: Lepore chronicles her visit to the Internet Archive in San Francisco while putting the trend for disruption (“everyone is either disrupting or being disrupted”) in historical context and tamping down the fear of a robot invasion. “Panic is not evidence of danger,” she calmly notes; “it’s evidence of panic.” The moving title essay is an elegy to a dear friend whose life, and untimely death from leukemia, led to Lepore’s becoming a writer. “All historians are coroners,” she remarks, explaining her deft dissection of past lives, but not all bring to their writing Lepore’s grace, precision, and deep humanity.

A noteworthy collection from an indispensable writer and thinker.

Kirkus Reviews

"Jill Lepore is America's greatest living essayist. No one else can sway so gracefully between the personal and the political, the micro and the macro, while remaining so firmly grounded in common human experience. She is a historian who can evoke the mystery of time, a memorist who uses recollection to open passages into the nation's psyche, a brilliant writer whose luminous prose can evoke at once the body and the body politic. These wonderful essays form a stunning mosaic of contemporary America and an alternative annal of our times."

Fintan O’Toole

"Dazzling . . . Lepore pursues both history and writing with great intelligence, boundless curiosity, a relentless pursuit of facts and concern about very important subjects. . . . Whether the subject is technology, law, culture, bicycling or children, her insights hold our attention... An outstanding collection, sure to be enjoyed by a wide range of readers."

Roger Bishop

"Those for whom history is an incomprehensible nightmare may find relief reading the works of Jill Lepore... [she] writes with a distinct perspective and sophistication, with wisdom... Lepore's 46 essays include thoughts on her relationships with her father and mother, the latter's life told in parallel with an account of Jane Franklin, Ben Franklin's sister; literature (Frankenstein as a slave narrative, and the life of Herman Melville); America's history and its present (the life of Eugene Debs, the history of the U.S. Supreme Court, and an account of the torture regime of the Bush administration); and her love of biking. Her curiosity's intensity is matched only by its scope; the sheer variety of topics will surprise and delight readers who revel in the perhaps dying art of a great generalist. The Deadline superbly chronicles the many crises and joys of our times—and their origins in times long past."

Walker Minot

"Lepore is a sophisticated and original thinker and an ensnaring, witty, and provocative storyteller . . . Lepore's galvanized readers will acquire new perspectives and new knowledge as she addresses complex matters with vigor, wit, and clarity."

Donna Seaman

"Lepore focuses her cogent insight on the most pressing issues of the past decade in American society, seamlessly moving between the intensely personal (a friend's cancer diagnosis) to the fiercely political (the urgent gun-violence crisis and ongoing debate over gun control) with authority and acumen . . . [The Deadline] brings wit, clarity, and necessary perspective to the biggest issues of today."

TIME - Cady Lang

"Jill Lepore is unquestionably one of America’s best historians; it’s fair to say she’s one of its best writers too . . . Taken in sequentially, Lepore’s essays constitute a dizzying, entertaining and urgent survey course on contemporary American life. Although Lepore dives deep into the waters of bygone eras, she always writes from the present — the palpable surface of history’s ever-rising tide."

Los Angeles Times - Jonathan Russell Clark

Jill Lepore, NEW YORKER staff writer and two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, is a captivating essayist and a terrific performer of her own writing. Her pace is upbeat without being too fast; her articulation is clear; and her voice, midrange with the occasional high note, blooms with enthusiasm. That enthusiasm, combined with humor and smarts-- she's a Harvard University history professor--makes for enticing listening. Whether she's exploring women's career options via the lives of her own mother and Ben Franklin's sister, reconsidering Mary Shelley's FRANKENSTEIN as a slave narrative, pondering Eugene Debs and American socialism, reveling in motherhood, or riffing on her love of bicycling--Lepore is erudite, funny, and thought-provoking. May she keep thinking, writing, and performing for many more years. A.C.S. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine

OCTOBER 2023 - AudioFile