When I Was a Child I Read Books: Essays
*Starred Review* There is more food for thought in one of Robinson’s well-turned paragraphs than in entire books. Esteemed for her award-winning novels Gilead (2004) and Home (2008), Robinson is a consummate and clarion essayist. In her third and most resounding collection, she addresses our toxic culture of diminishment, arguing that as our view of society shrinks, public discourse coarsens, corruption spreads, education is undermined, science denigrated, spirituality and loving kindness are siphoned from religion, and democracy itself is imperiled. What has made America great, she reminds us, is our “heroic” focus on and investment in the public good. In the brilliantly corrective “Austerity as Ideology,” Robinson looks back to her Cold War childhood, during which America’s response to crisis was to ramp up our commitment to art and science. Now she fears that our obsession with “market economics” is putting us in danger of “losing the ethos that has sustained what is most to be valued in our civilization” as public schools, universities, libraries, and the free press come under siege. In “Imagination and Community,” Robinson lucidly and movingly explains how the imagination is the wellspring of healthy communities, and how profoundly reading enhances our capacity for sympathy. Intellectually sophisticated, beautifully reasoned with gravitas and grace, Robinson’s call to reclaim humaneness beams like the sun breaking through smothering clouds.       HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: The great success of Robinson’s novels will ensure interest in her brilliant reflections on the most urgent questions of our lives. --Donna Seaman