This engaging collection of essays--some published here for the first time--reveals Smith as a passionate and precise essayist, equally at home in the world of great books and bad movies, family and philosophy, British comedians and Italian divas.
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This engaging collection of essays--some published here for the first time--reveals Smith as a passionate and precise essayist, equally at home in the world of great books and bad movies, family and philosophy, British comedians and Italian divas.
Read Less
I checked this book out from the library because I enjoy Zadie Smith's writing, even though I'm not usually a fan of nonfiction. I found her insights about various books, movies, and her family thought-provoking and well thought out. Still, it was one sentence in the last essay about David Foster Wallace that made me decide that I had to own this book:
"It was meant for readers of my generation, born under the star of four interlocking revolutions, undreamed of in James's philosophy: the ubiquity of television, the voraciousness of late capitalism, the triumph of therapeutic discourse, and philosophy's demotion into a branch of linguistics."
With this sentence, she captured and wove together into one cohesive thought many of the issues that I've struggled with for decades. Just brilliant.
