How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken

"Daniel Mendelsohn brightens the dour New York Review of Books like few other contributors," writes David Haglund, reviewing How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken for the New York Observer. "This is partly thanks to his subject matter: neither Iraq nor climate change but literature, theater and the movies. It''s also thanks to his - not style, exactly; Mr Mendelsohn''s a gifted writer, but the prose of his essays is less lyrical than that of his books, The Lost (2006) and The Elusive Embrace (1999). What distinguishes his criticism, rather, is a willingness to address not just the arts but their reception. He writes reviews as cultural commentary, and he''s more or less mastered the form."

In the San Francisco Bay Guardian, Jason Shimai finds the book "excellent. But it lacks something I can''t help wanting from the criticism I read, no matter how often some denunciation tries to shame the desire out of me. One of Mendelsohn''s pieces even takes novelist and literary critic Dale Peck''s 2005 review collection, Hatchet Jobs to task for indulging in the very thing I look for: bitchiness". Posted by: dwhudson    Source