How Dumb Can You Get?

Mark Bauerlein, The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future [Or, Don't Trust Anyone Under 30] (Tarcher/Penguin, 264 pages, $27.50, 2008) I’m a feet-on-the-ground kind of guy, so I seldom have visions. But a year or so ago, while I was in the library of the little university where I teach, something odd happened. At first, I didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary. Downstairs, the students were busily at the computer terminals, looking up... 
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Art that takes your breath away

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Of Memory and Monuments

  *** Stephens Gerard Malone, I Still Have a Suitcase in Berlin (Random House Canada, 319 pages, $32.95 Cdn., 2008)   In Berlin you'll find more monuments to the catastrophes of history than in any other city in Europe. Given German history, I suppose that's appropriate. This spring, civic officials unveiled the city's latest memorial. Located at the edge of the Tiergarten, Berlin's central park, it's right across the road from one of the German capitol's largest... 
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Career Moves

Neil Gross, Richard Rorty: The Making of an American Philosopher (Chicago: University of Chicago, 367 pages, 2008) 1. Richard Rorty (1931-2007) was, to my mind, the most interesting philosopher of the last quarter of the 20th century, an enviably clear and brilliant writer, and politically, one of the most sensible leftwing “public intellectuals” to grace the American forum. He was also something of an odd duck. Rorty was a precocious 15-year-old student at the University of Chicago in 1946; a... 
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What Have We Learned? What Have We Forgotten?

Tony Judt, Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century (Penguin, 2008) Historian Tony Judt’s telling use of the biblical phrase, “the years the locusts ate,” which he employs to describe the years since the fall of communism in 1989, can pretty well be applied, as he demonstrates, to our memory of almost everything after World War II. The British-born Judt, who directs New York University’s Erich Remarque Institute, is the author, as some readers will recall, of the... 
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…and Found

*** Daniel Mendelsohn, The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (Harper, 516 p., 2006)   No one of Jewish descent growing up in America just after World War II could be entirely unaffected by the Holocaust. In my family, Uncle Walter and Aunt Holla were presented to us (I’m tempted to say, “exhibited” to us) in the early 1950s as our “survivor” relatives. They had managed “to make it out just in time,” I was repeatedly told, in what became the recitation of a family legend, a story... 
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Can You Read This? Don’t You Wish You Couldn’t?

*** Susan Jacoby, The Age of American Unreason (New York: Pantheon, 356 p., 2008)   A couple of decades ago, back in the 1980s, a friend of mine in Vancouver displayed a jokey bi-lingual poster on his front door that said in big letters: “Fin de lire” (“The end of reading”). At the bottom of the poster, in small print, its punchline asked, “Can you read this? Don’t you wish you couldn’t?” I.e., wouldn’t you like to be as dopey as everybody else? Susan Jacoby’s The Age... 
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In Search of Lost Poets

Roberto Bolano, The Savage Detectives (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 577 p., 2007, translated by Natasha Wimmer) I first encountered, if that’s the right word, the Chilean-born writer Roberto Bolano (pronounced Bo-lahn-yo) as a real-life “character” in Javier Cercas’s novel, Soldiers of Salamis (2001; English translation, 2003). Cercas presents Bolano as a “softly-spoken, curly-haired, scruffy, unshaven Chilean” who offers his Spanish literary colleague some indispensable advice about writing. It... 
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Post-Communist Story

Bruce Benderson, The Romanian: Story of an Obsession (Tarcher/Penguin, 401 pages, 2006) If you’re not particularly interested in middle-aged, pill-popping, alcoholic New York writers who specialize in tales of demimonde sleaze and who fall in love with hustlers in post-communist eastern Europe, then it’s unlikely that you’ll be immediately attracted to Bruce Benderson’s erotic memoir, The Romanian: Story of an Obsession, published a couple of years ago. Actually, that’s not categorically true,... 
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Dark Places

*** John Stape, The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad (Bond St. Books / Doubleday Canada, 378 p., $35.95, 2007) Michael Gorra, ed., The Portable Conrad (Penguin, 702 p., $21.50, 2007) I I didn't really appreciate Joseph Conrad's famous Heart of Darkness--so famous that its title has become a cliché for anyone travelling to a seemingly remote patch of the planet–the first time around, when it was a staple on college reading lists. As V.S. Naipaul says (in a 1974 essay, "Conrad's... 
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