Yay! The new book from George Scialabba has arrived in the mail: "Only a Voice: Essays" (2023).

Rarely since the early 1990s (with the books by Michael Ventura) has an author from the U.S. influenced me that much.

Although his book review essays vary in quality, his style of presenting as a debate the views of selected authors which he confronts with each other to lead that discussion to the topics he's interested in, is of high intellectual and thus educational value.

Pursuing such "monologue-styled debates" publicly, in magazines and papers, continues a centuries-old tradition. To have his voice from the (more or less) progressive side is a rare exception to the dominance of the conservative tradition that found its master in the late works of Lionel Trilling (who started out as contributer to the Partisan Review).

It's good to see that Scialabba dedicates his new book to Noam Chomsky and Ralph Nader and offers his thanks to people like Barbara Ehrenreich and Richard Rorty.

#amlesen #sources