Mark Edmundson, Author . Random $24.95 (288p) ISBN 978-0-375-50407-5
Like Dead Poet's Society, this memoir tells of an extraordinary individual who touched his students' souls and steered at least one of them—Edmundson—toward the life of the mind. Its setting, however, is not a New England prep...
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Mark Edmundson, Author . Bloomsbury $25.95 (276p) ISBN 978-1-58234-537-6
Expanding on his 2006 New York Times Magazine
article, “Freud and the Fundamentalist Urge,” Edmundson develops his thesis about the lure of powerful, authoritarian leaders. He begins in 1938 Vienna on the eve of Hitler’s invasion...
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Mark Edmundson, Author Bloomsbury Publishing PLC $21.95 (224p) ISBN 978-1-58234-425-6
Extending the argument of his tome Literature Against Philosophy: Plato to Derrida, Edmundson laments the state of liberal arts teaching--and, despite his protestations to the contrary, effectively caricatures critical theory as the soulless...
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Mark Edmundson. Bloomsbury, $22 (240p) ISBN 978-1-62040-107-1
As he headed to college, Edmundson (Why Read?) told his father that he might pursue a prelaw track. Though he wasn’t sure he wanted to be a lawyer, he figured that lawyers made decent money. His father, he says, “detonated”: “He told me that I was...
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Mark Edmundson. Penguin Press, $26.95 (230p) ISBN 978-1-59420-575-0
Edmundson’s memoir attempts to explain why football means so much to him, and why its influence on his life has been so lasting. In the course of all this, he argues unconvincingly that there are lessons that only football can teach—but this is a...
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Mark Edmundson. Bloomsbury, $25 (288p) ISBN 978-1-63286-305-8
In a book that reads like lectures notes for a meandering college course, Edmundson (Why Teach?), a professor at the University of Virginia, attempts to answer the question of why, in an era of diminishing readership and an increasing number of...
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Mark Edmundson. Harvard Univ, $29.95 (224p) ISBN 978-0-674-23716-2
Edmundson (Self and Soul), an English professor at the University of Virginia, reads Walt Whitman’s 1855 poem “Song of Myself” as a blueprint for democratic principles in this speculative work of literary criticism. To Edmundson, the “most profound...
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Mark Edmundson. Yale Univ, $26 (192p) ISBN 978-0-30026-581-1
Edmundson (Song of Ourselves), a University of Virginia English professor, delivers an uneven take on the superego. Drawing on Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents—which argues that as societies advance and become less tolerant of aggression,...
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