How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken - by Daniel Mendelsohn (Paperback)

About the Book

From the award-winning, bestselling author of "The Lost" and one of America's most esteemed public intellectuals comes a brilliant and engaging display of the critic's works.

From the Back Cover

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 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.

Review Quotes

"An evocative, ruminative writer." - William Grimes, New York Times
"A substantial collection of essays. . . . This is an uncommon reader. . . . Unlike so many critics whose writing seems designed to draw attention to themselves and the impressiveness of their mental processes and theoretical underpinnings, Mendelsohn is rightly content to let his methodology speak for itself. . . . He not only talks the talk, but also walks the walk." - The San Francisco Chronicle
"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
"Mendelsohn's wit is invariably harnessed to a graver wisdom; the verve and sparkle to an underlying conviction, often anguished. . . . He has stimulating things to say about Noel Coward, Oscar Wilde, Truman Capote, Pedro Almodóvar and Ted Hughes' adaptation of Euripides' "Alcestis," among many others. . . . His range is wide, frequently butting against received critical opinion." - The Los Angeles Times