Books

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Dworkin’s Jisei

‘Religion Without God’ is a lovely swan song. It is short—it’s based on the Einstein Lectures delivered at the University of Bern in 2011—but eloquent and rich.
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Grief Detained

Barnes’s broodings are intelligent, often eloquent, and just to the elegiac occasion. But Barnes is also sometimes hard.
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Squeaky Hinge

Thomas Cahill’s words are not easy to understand but point to a persistent presentism, a tendency to view the past through the lens of the present.
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Witness

‘Story of a Secret State’ promises an insider’s perspective on Poland’s Home Army, the largest resistance organization in Nazi-occupied Europe --- and delivers it.
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Voracious

Sartre was unquestionably one of those by whom language lives, and vice versa. Many people read voraciously; Sartre wrote voraciously.
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Making the Past Present

As with many of Auden’s longer poems, ‘For the Time Being’ is a slippery beast. Whenever you think you’ve got a hold of it, it goes off in another direction.
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Accidental Selections

The books I’m recommending here I more or less bumped into by accident, usually when some reviewer or author of a memoir took the trouble to cite something good.
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A Bold Piece

Alice McDermott’s latest novel is a compelling accounting of a life that begins in Depression-era Brooklyn and winds its way to the late-twentieth-century suburbs.
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Legalese

It is a mark of Antonin Scalia’s pioneering influence that originalism and fidelity to text have become a staple of the Supreme Court’s interpretive methodology.
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The Limits of Candor

“For Discrimination” offers the bravest and most honest defense of affirmative action in a long time (maybe ever), and for that we are in Randall Kennedy’s debt.
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Buried Traumas

Four decades after Franco’s death, relics of the past are finding their way into Spain’s museums, where they can be both preserved and politically neutralized.
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