Overview

Whether he's on Broadway or at the movies, considering a new bestseller or revisiting a literary classic, Daniel Mendelsohn's judgments over the past fifteen years have provoked and dazzled with their deep erudition, disarming emotionality, and tart wit. Now How Beautiful It Is And How Easily It Can Be Broken reveals all at once the enormous stature of Mendelsohn's achievement and demonstrates why he is considered one of our greatest critics. Writing with a lively intelligence and arresting originality, he brings his distinctive combination of scholarly rigor and conversational ease to bear across eras, cultures, and genres, from Roman games to video games. His interpretations of our most talked-about films-from the work of Pedro Almodóvar to Brokeback Mountain, from United 93 and World Trade Center to 300, Marie Antoinette, and The Hours-have sparked debate and changed the way we watch movies. Just as stunning and influential are his dispatches on theater and literature, from The Producers to Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex, from The Lovely Bones to the works of Harold Pinter. Together these thirty brilliant and engaging essays passionately articulate the themes that have made Daniel Mendelsohn a crucial voice in today's cultural conversation: the aesthetic and indeed political dangers of imposing contemporary attitudes on the great classics; the ruinous effect of sentimentality on the national consciousness in the post-9/11 world; the vital importance of the great literature of the past for a meaningful life in the present. How Beautiful It Is And How Easily It Can Be Broken makes it clear that no other contemporary thinker is as engaged with as many aspects of our culture and its influences as Mendelsohn is, and no one practices the vanishing art of popular criticism with more acuity, humor, and feeling.

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9780061456435

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Reviews

An elegant collection of essays. . . . Mendelsohn reveals intellectual breadth in his ability to draw on his training as a classicist to look at contemporary culture. . . . These essays richly repay the time readers spend in their company. -- Publishers Weekly (starred review) Brilliant. . . . Masterful. . . . Wise, funny. . . . A wonderful collection. -- Time Out New York Mendelsohn takes on contemporary culture with humor and incisive analysis. -- The New York Sun

An elegant collection of essays. . . . Mendelsohn reveals intellectual breadth in his ability to draw on his training as a classicist to look at contemporary culture. . . . These essays richly repay the time readers spend in their company. -- Publishers Weekly (starred review)

An elegant collection of essays. . . . Mendelsohn reveals intellectual breadth in his ability to draw on his training as a classicist to look at contemporary culture. . . . These essays richly repay the time readers spend in their company. --Publishers Weekly (starred review) Brilliant. . . . Masterful. . . . Wise, funny. . . . A wonderful collection. --Time Out New York Mendelsohn takes on contemporary culture with humor and incisive analysis. --The New York Sun

Author Information

Daniel Mendelsohn was born in Long Island and educated at the University of Virginia and at Princeton. He is a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books as well as the New York Times Magazine and the New York Times Book Review, and is contributing editor at Travel + Leisure. His previous books include the memoir The Elusive Embrace, a New York Times Notable Book and a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year, and the international best seller ‘The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million’, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Prix Médicis, and many other honours. He teaches at Bard College.

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