What Are Intellectuals Good For? -- (with a Foreword by Scott McLemee) [Perfect Paperback]

George Scialabba (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 1, 2009 | ISBN-10: 0978515668 | ISBN-13: 978-0978515669 | Edition: First

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 con-sequences of our species cyber-evolution. George Scialabba, a book columnist for the Boston Globe and frequent contributor to the Boston Review, Dissent, the American Prospect, and the Nation, is admired by a small circle of discerning readers. What Are Intellectuals Good For?, his second essay collection, brings his eloquent and modest (Christopher Hitchens) voice to a larger audience. Mark Oppenheimer, a columnist for the Huffington Post, included Scialabba s first collection, Divided Mind (2006), in a list of Great Books the Pulitzers Missed. Scott McLemee, the popular Intellectual Affairs columnist of InsideHigherEd, profiled him at length and has contributed a foreword.

Editorial Reviews

Review

George Scialabba has, over the years, delivered perhaps the most reliably acute cultural commentary to be found anywhere on the ethical left. He brings the review-essay to a state of high development, incorporating elements of memoir and skillfully deploying the wide range of literary and historical reference he commands. As this sample shows, he writes with wit and economy, and his work gives pleasure as it enlightens. --Norman Rush

Koestler's Rubashov lay in jail under the familiar and fatal constraint to put himself in the position of his opponent, and to see the scene through the other's eyes. George Scialabba shows, with his combined eloquence and modesty, that this critical intellectual faculty can transcend the prisoner's dilemma. --Christopher Hitchens

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

About the Author

George Scialabba was born (1948) and raised in East Boston, MA, and attended Harvard (AB, 1969) and Columbia (MA, 1972). He has been a social worker (Mass. Dept. of Public Welfare, 1974-80), a clerical worker (Harvard University, 1980 to the present), a faculty member of the Bennington Graduate Writing Seminars (2007-8), and a freelance book critic. His column, New Thinking, appears bimonthly in the Boston Globe book section. In 1991 he was awarded the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing of the National Book Critics Circle. His first collection, Divided Mind, was published in 2006 by Arrowsmith Press.

Product Details

• Perfect Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Pressed Wafer Pr; First edition (May 1, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0978515668
• ISBN-13: 978-0978515669
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6.1 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #800,929 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

34 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant overview of a grand era of thought, April 29, 2009

By 

Aaron Swartz - See all my reviews

This review is from: What Are Intellectuals Good For? -- (with a Foreword by Scott McLemee) (Perfect Paperback)

There was once an era where great men strode among us. The Intellectuals, as they were known, had an opinion on everything and would share it, at length, with elegance and verve. Unfortunately, the explosion of information beginning in the sixties rendered them all-but-extinct and the electronic transformation of the past few decades threatens to finish the job. Still, we can't but admire them and their milieu.

This certainly seems to be George Scialabba's position. The greatest working book reviewer -- when the National Book Critics Circle inaugurated their Excellence in Criticism award, he was their first recipient -- collects his reviews of these grand men's work and a sampling of his own in his new collection, _What Are Intellectuals Good For?_ The result is a delightful introduction to this world of ideas.

Scialabba's own position is best summarized by his dedication: "For Chomsky, Rorty, Lasch." In other words, he is a man of impeccable left-wing politics, a refusal to believe in any philosophical verities, and a deep skepticism about the benefits of Enlightenment progress. This is not exactly a popular combination -- surely Chomsky and Ehrenreich have more fans than Rorty and Lasch -- but it is a provocative one. And Scialabba's genius is that he can make such counterintuitive ideas, expressed by such Olympian intellectuals, seem not just clear but common sense. A dedicated follower of the left-rationalist-progressive tradition, I had to continually catch myself from nodding along in agreement.

Recommended for anyone who's a fan of the Intellectual Scene and the men and women who inhabit it.

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good to know they exist, June 1, 2009

By 

Jay C. Smith (Portland, OR USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: What Are Intellectuals Good For? -- (with a Foreword by Scott McLemee) (Perfect Paperback)

What Are Intellectuals Good For? -- (with a Foreword by Scott McLemee)
Here is a publishing idea: find a narrowly-known non-tenured freelance social critic who has written book reviews, mostly for left-leaning (Dissent, The Nation, The Village Voice) or regional (Boston) publications; collect several of these, including a substantial majority that date to the 1990s or even the late 1980s; then put them together with a couple of introductory essays into a paperback volume with limited distribution. Obviously the folks at Pressed Wafer will not get rich from choosing to do just this when they handsomely produced George Scialabba's What Are Intellectuals Good For?, but their cultural commitment is commendable.

Often such collections seem stale, the pieces having lost whatever freshness they may have had at the time of their original publication. Scialabba's typical approach cuts against that tendency in this case, however. He usually comments on the larger body of work of the authors he reviews, often includes some biographical information about them, and frequently draws comparisons or contrasts to other cultural figures. A good example is "A Whole World of Heroes," his review of Christopher Lasch's (posthumous) Revolt of the Elites, where Scialabba assesses Lasch's broad oeuvre in ten pages. Thus, for me this collection served as a good refresher on several thinkers whose work I had not picked up in awhile (for instance, Dwight Macdonald, Lionel Trilling, Richard Rorty, Alan Bloom, and others) and an introduction to a few with whom I was previously unfamiliar (notably Walter Karp and Nicola Chiaromonte).

Most of those Scialabba covers have been critics who, like Scialabba himself, have commented broadly on society, politics, and literature. They fit Irving Howe's definition of an intellectual as someone "who writes about subjects outside his field, he [or she] has no field."

Scialabba faced word-count constraints when he originally wrote these reviews and as a consequence his stated views are sometimes a bit too abrupt or sweeping, begging further development or explanation. Over the course of the entire collection, however, readers get a relatively complete and coherent picture of Scialabba's outlook. His own opinions are usually front and center.

His politics are from the left, but in no predictable knee-jerk fashion. He is certainly anti-imperialist (Chomsky receives much praise) and egalitarian. Yet, like several of the intellectuals he admires (Macdonald, Rorty, and Matthew Arnold, for example), he recognizes limitations inherent in the tension between democratic aims and those of "high" culture. He is skeptical about what he considers to be the excesses of multiculturalism in academic politics. He favorably quotes Rorty to the effect that the best that democratic societies may do is to help people get a little pleasure out of their lives, that those "who have a taste for sublimity will have to pursue it on their own time."

There is more than a bit of a conservative traditionalist in Scialabba. He claims Edmund Burke recognized that capitalism is subversive of "prejudice, tradition, customary morality", and he criticizes William Buckley for failing to acknowledge this. Scialabba himself has concerns about values that have eroded, and seems to share with John Gray (among others) a sense that the Enlightenment set us on a course toward nihilism, whereas we cannot do altogether without some certainties and some hierarchies.

One reasonably might ask whether Scialabba answers the question of his title: why do we need intellectuals, anyway? One answer is his (simultaneously left and conservative) view that "Only rootedness makes sustained resistance to the modern Leviathan state, corporations, and media possible," and our intellectual heritage helps sustain the requisite foundation. Reviewing Sven Birkerts' The Gutenberg Elegies, Scialabba ponders that there is now so much available information that it is impossible for anybody to "put together all of culture," although by intuition he continues to think there should be. I am reminded of what has been said of wilderness areas: most people do not go there, but it is good to know that they exist.

7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a challenging read, June 29, 2009

By 

Deanna J. Marquart "Fiction Fan" (Sacramento, CA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: What Are Intellectuals Good For? -- (with a Foreword by Scott McLemee) (Perfect Paperback)

Compelling, provocative, and well-written ... also slightly disturbing, in the sense that he made me worry that "public intellectuals" don't have much of interest or value to contribute to the conversation about the state of our society and our politics. He seems to think that "more precise information" is the most we can hope for. Gah. Still, I continue thinking about his analysis.