What Are Intellectuals Good For?
George Scialabba has, over the years, delivered perhaps the most reliably acute cultural commentary to be found anywhere on the ethical left. He brings the review-essay to a state of high development, incorporating elements of memoir and skillfully deploying the wide range of literary and historical reference he commands. As this sample shows, he writes with wit and economy, and his work gives pleasure as it enlightens. --Norman RushKoestler's Rubashov lay in jail under the familiar and fatal constraint to put himself in the position of his opponent, and to see the scene through the other's eyes. George Scialabba shows, with his combined eloquence and modesty, that this critical intellectual faculty can transcend the prisoner's dilemma. --Christopher HitchensScialabba writes with marvelous fluency and conversational ease and is a gifted expositor of the ideas of friend and foe alike ... Reading straight though this volume leaves one with an appreciation for Scialabba's many gifts particularly his rare combination of intellectual depth and reach with readability. He inhabits his role comfortably, without histrionics or nostalgia and with an untroubled resignation toward the contemporary intellectual's diminished standing in a cultural world now dominated by specialized knowledge and professional guilds. He manages, nonetheless, to provide a personal guide through the controversies of the age. --Wesley Yang, Bookforum