05/02/2022
Essayist Deresiewicz (The Death of the Artist) eviscerates “groupthink” in this razor-sharp collection made up mostly of previously published pieces. Identifying the book’s unifying theme as an “attempt to defend, and, as well as I can, to enact, a certain conception of the self... developed in solitude, in fearless dialogue, by reading, through education as the nurturing of souls; embodied in original art and independent thought,” Deresiewicz is at his most trenchant when analyzing the technological and cultural forces arrayed against his preferred mode of being. He compares the links between TV and boredom—“television, by eliminating the need to learn to make use of one’s lack of occupation, prevents one from discovering how to enjoy it”—to the relationship between the internet and loneliness, alleging that social media and text messaging have helped to rob people of “the propensity for introspection” and “the capacity for solitude.” Elsewhere, Deresiewicz contends that the “culture of political correctness” at elite private colleges provides affluent students and faculty “with the ideological resources to alibi or erase their privilege.” Despite a tendency to generalize and the occasional slip into ungracious embitterment, as when he writes that having a “white penis” put two strikes against him on the academic job market, Deresiewicz anatomizes modern life with skill and fierce conviction. Readers will relish grappling with these erudite provocations. (Aug.)
[Deresiewicz] constructs beautiful sentences which often remind me of the late novelist Philip Roth. Like Roth, Deresiewicz is whip smart, erudite, and an artisan of language.”
—California Review of Books
“These 42 thematically wide-ranging and bottomlessly rewarding essays demonstrate the author's amiable skepticism and not-quite contrarianism.”
—Shelf Awareness
“When Deresiewicz, the winner of a National Book Critics Circle award for excellence in reviewing, has a juicy target, it can be surprisingly good fun: His assault on Harold Bloom’s late-era woolliness is a classic takedown, and his jeremiad about the folly of elevating food to an art form is debatable in the right way: a provocation with enough facts behind it to be worth discussing.”
—Kirkus
“Deresiewicz eviscerates 'groupthink' in this razor-sharp collection...[he] anatomizes modern life with skill and fierce conviction. Readers will relish grappling with these erudite provocations.”
—Publishers Weekly
“William Deresiewicz is the most readable and reasonable, persuasive and penetrating, uncompromising and understanding of critics. The End of Solitude is consistently stimulating, at once classic and contemporary.”
—Geoff Dyer, author of The Last Days of Roger Federer: And Other Endings
“William Deresiewicz is his own man, he thinks for himself, and he has thought deeply about the way we live now. So much of what he says is right on the money, but even where one might disagree, he is always stimulating and provocative. He uses the essay for its classical purpose: to know himself better and in so doing to put forth wisdom.”
—Phillip Lopate, editor of The Golden Age of the American Essay: 1945–1970
“William Deresiewicz is one of the important cultural critics of our age. His essays are morally rigorous, perfectly stylish, and a joy to read. But more than that, they are good for the soul. They provide a blueprint for how his readers can be better humans.”
—Franklin Foer, author of World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech
“William Deresiewicz is one of my favorite cultural critics working today and these essays remind me why. He doesn’t just interpret the culture; he builds onto it as he goes. Through sheer force of his own fine writing, he makes more culture. He also makes a kind of exultant and endless sense. His subjects here are wide-ranging—he examines everything from education to technology to friendship—but his depth of knowledge and precision of thought make this collection its own succinct and deeply satisfying entity. It will be a permanent fixture on my bookshelf.”
—Meghan Daum, author of The Problem with Everything: My Journey Through the New Culture Wars
“William Deresiewicz is my favorite lapsarian: lapsed Jew, lapsed academic, probably a lapsed liberal (though definitely not a conservative). But that's just because, as these totally absorbing essays show, he is too restless to stay in one place, or in one camp. For Deresiewicz, labels are temporary and dispensable, even as virtuous practices — like friendship, loyalty, close reading, and a good walk, in person, with no electronic devices — are eternal.”
—Mark Oppenheimer, author of Squirrel Hill: The Tree of Life Synagogue Shooting and the Soul of a Neighborhood
“Restless, shrewd, probing, melancholic (in a good way!), William Deresiewicz’s essays seek out the largest of questions—the condition of self and soul in illiberal times—skewering pieties with a deliciously rapier wit, daring us to imagine more intellectually honest ways of encountering the world.”
—Laura Kipnis, author of Men: Notes from an Ongoing Investigation
“It is a lucky break to share the culture with William Deresiewicz, because he knows it so deeply and he illuminates it so well. He has an uncommon gift for keeping his head in the clouds and his feet on the ground at the same time, so that his criticism is both principled and shrewd. He is precisely what a real humanist in America looks like now.”
—Leon Wieseltier
Praise for William Deresiewicz
“[Deresiewicz] is a striker, to put it in soccer terms. He’s a vivid writer, a literary critic whose headers tend to land in the back corner of the net.”
—Dwight Garner in the New York Times
“Deresiewicz has spent his career as a sort of Henry Adams figure, passionately invested in learning rather than in formal education, character rather than persona.”
—Hua Hsu in the New Yorker
William Deresiewicz, author, essayist, and literary critic, has compiled a variety of essays on solitude and leadership, the pitfalls of an Ivy League education (he previously taught English at Yale), and social media's incursion into daily life, among other timely concerns. Narrator Eric Jason Martin adopts a slow pace that is fitting for the unifying theme of the importance of solitude as an inspiration for reflection, as opposed to the distracting mental noise of constant connection. Martin is clear, informative, and frank as he covers technology culture, higher education, the social imagination, arts and letters, and the Jewish people. While some conclusions are overly sweeping, the writing is, overall, thought-provoking and well elaborated. S.E.G. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine
William Deresiewicz, author, essayist, and literary critic, has compiled a variety of essays on solitude and leadership, the pitfalls of an Ivy League education (he previously taught English at Yale), and social media's incursion into daily life, among other timely concerns. Narrator Eric Jason Martin adopts a slow pace that is fitting for the unifying theme of the importance of solitude as an inspiration for reflection, as opposed to the distracting mental noise of constant connection. Martin is clear, informative, and frank as he covers technology culture, higher education, the social imagination, arts and letters, and the Jewish people. While some conclusions are overly sweeping, the writing is, overall, thought-provoking and well elaborated. S.E.G. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine
2022-05-12
Sharp commentaries on the arts and academia and the forces the author believes threaten them.
This selection of essays by veteran critic Deresiewicz, which followsThe Death of the Artist, reveals an open-mindedness when it comes to subject matter. The author writes enthusiastically about fiction, dance, TV, and more. He admires heterodox intellectuals like Harold Rosenberg and polymaths like Clive James. But he also writes with a conservative cantankerousness about what he sees as higher education’s descent into groupthink and younger generations’ rush to embrace it. In multiple essays, he decries colleges’ dismantling of the humanities in favor of STEM departments more obviously capable of minting interchangeable employees, and he calls out the dogmatic thinking that consumes elite institutions. He gripes about political correctness, partly in exasperation with its knee-jerk tendencies (“If you are a white man, you are routinely regarded as guilty until proven innocent”), but he’s also upset at its broader cynicism, the way it’s a “fig leaf for the competitive individualism of meritocratic neoliberalism, with its worship of success above all.” When Deresiewicz, the winner of a National Book Critics Circle award for excellence in reviewing, has a juicy target, it can be surprisingly good fun: His assault on Harold Bloom’s late-era woolliness is a classic takedown, and his jeremiad about the folly of elevating food to an art form is debatable in the right way: a provocation with enough facts behind it to be worth discussing. A stronger sense of humor might help some of his assertions go down easier, and he’s capable of it, as in a wry piece about Bernard Malamud, a fellow fish-out-of-water Jew in Oregon. Deresiewicz’s soberness speaks to the intensity of his concern: The humanities are under threat by legislators, technology, and its own practitioners, and he’s a passionate advocate for their dignity.
Sometimes cranky but consistently engaging takes on cultural corrosion and collapse.
