AMONG THE ADVANTAGES of retirement is getting around to the years’ worth (decades’ worth?) of books that I have been wanting to read but had no immediate, pressing need to read, such as this collection of articles and reviews by George Scialabba.
I figured the book was a good bet because I have been enjoying Scialabba’s reviews for years—always crisply written, well-informed, and thought-provoking.
The earliest collected here is a piece on Leszek Kolakowski, Richard Rorty, and Alasdair MacIntyre that appeared in the Village Voice in 1983, the most recent a valedictory piece on Christopher Hitchens that appeared in n+1 in 2005–that is, a farewell not to Hitchens the person, who died in 2011, but to Hitchens the writer one looks forward to reading, given his support of the war in Iraq. (Hitchens was still alive when this collection was published in 2009.)
I am on Scialabba’s wavelength in several ways. I have a wide, deep soft spot for the New York intellectuals of the post-WW II era, and so does he; the deeply appreciative piece on Dwight MacDonald was a highlight of the book for me, and I also relished those on Lionel Trilling and Irving Howe. Though not a conservative, I am always interested in what an intelligent and articulate argument for conservative ideas looks like, and so is he, hence the serious appraisals here of John Gray, Allan Bloom, and William F. Buckley.
We even dislike some of the same things. When Scialabba calls Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism “an inexhaustibly tiresome book,” all I can say is amen. (I know he’s important—but one can be important and inexhaustibly tiresome in the bargain.)
I don’t like Christopher Lasch as much as Scialabba does, but reading Scialabba makes me think I should like Lasch more than I do. I like Isaiah Berlin a lot more than Scialabba does, but his point about the cold water Berlin throws on any kind of aspirational thinking sounds right. We are of one mind, I was happy to see, on Rorty.
He’s a national treasure, I think. I haven’t seen much by him lately, but I trust he’s still reading and writing.
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