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GEORGE SCIALABBA
discusses
What Are Intellectuals Good For?
Selected Essays
in conversation with
essayist JOHN H. SUMMERS
Harvard Book Store is pleased to welcome critic and Boston Globe book columnist GEORGE SCIALABBA for a discussion of the role of intellectuals in America, based on material in his new book, What Are Intellectuals Good For? Selected Essays. Mr. Scialabba will appear in conversation with essayist JOHN H. SUMMERS. What Are Intellectuals Good For? contains searching appraisals of a large gallery of twentieth-century intellectuals, including Randolph Bourne, Dwight Macdonald, Lionel Trilling, Irving Howe, Isaiah Berlin, William F. Buckley Jr., Allan Bloom, Richard Rorty, Stanley Fish, Christopher Lasch, Edward Said, Ellen Willis, and Christopher Hitchens. It also includes two wide-ranging general essays on intellectuals and politics and concludes with a speculative essay on the moral and political consequences of our species' cyber-evolution. "Scialabba 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 "George Scialabba belongs to an endangered species: the independent writer and reviewer. In an era of literary razzle-dazzle, he is easily overlooked. Neither portentous nor pretentious, without a university or think-tank imprimatur, he simply gives us what he has: crystalline prose and a supple intelligence unafraid to criticize heroes of either left or right. His writings are a priceless guide to contemporary intellectual life." —Russell Jacoby (Picture Imperfect: Utopian Thought for an Anti-Utopian Age) "This book is the work of a gifted critic who restores to authority an idea of the public intellectual as one whose prose itself—lucid, ardent, immensely thoughtful—makes educated citizens of us all." —Vivian Gornick (The Men in My Life)
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George Scialabba was born and raised in East Boston and attended Harvard (AB, 1969) and Columbia (MA, 1972). His column, "New Thinking," appears bimonthly in the Boston Globe book section. In 1991 he was awarded the Nona Balakian Excellence in Reviewing award from the National Book Critics Circle. His first collection, Divided Mind, was published in 2006, and his work is archived at georgescialabba.net.
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