Ditto to Jay Smooth about “purely cerebral,” except I also find it an incredibly inapt description of Ascension. “So intense it’s hard to take” is what I’d say.

What about Matt Taibbi’s review of Friedman’s “The World is Flat”?

Many of Roger Ebert’s 0 Stars reviews are also good. I realize these are a bit downmarket compared to some of the other suggestions. (Find Ebert’s by going here, and plugging in “zero” and “zero” into “from” and “to” in the stars pull-down.)

Other than those few exceptions, their discographies have probably the most intense emotional resonance I’ve ever experienced in music. Especially Coltrane whose work is, to many fans, best known for how it evokes and embodies his lifelong quest for a deeper spirituality.

Also, conveying emotion via music involves the melody and harmony at least as much as the beat.. but Miles and Trane usually had plenty of swing going on regardless, no less than Duke to my ears.

I’m just thankful Larkin never got around to opining on hip-hop.

Or, for that matter, the entire dedication of Byron’s Don Juan, which tears holes in pretty much all of his contemporaries, and BRUTALIZES Southey.

Speaking of Gingrich, the best filleting of his intellectual dilletantism I’ve ever read—and which, if you stretched the definition, could be called a review essay—is Joan Didion’s “Newt Gingrich, Superstar”, which is reprinted in her book Political Fictions.

As for Peck, I rolled my eyes and ignored the squalls which passed through the chattering classes when the infamous Rick Moody review was published, and gritted my teeth and reached for the gin when it was all repeated on the publication of Hatchet Jobs, so I freely confess to a distorted perspective, but it seems to me that he’s now retreated so far up his own arse, transforming his attitude to all fiction into that of a petulant, nihilistic child (see here for a timely example), that his entire critical oeuvre has been retroactively discredited.

It is an attempt to show the reader what it would subjectively feel like to read, say, Orwell, not only in a foreign language, but having missed 6 years of education due to having been captured as a sex slave by a gang of child soldiers.

As for the Burnyeat review, isn’t it taking a sledgehammer to crush a flea? Robert Nozick put it much more pithily: Straussians are people who believe that the sum total of political wisdom is that only the wise should rule. Ouch!