Kept in the Dark is one of Anthony Trollope’s very last novels, and surely one of his very worst. Written in wincingly melodramatic — and insanely repetitive — style, Kept in the Dark is too boring even to be silly.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Infidel is one of the major memoirs of the age: a stunning story of a courageous human spirit emancipating herself from ignorance and oppression.
Jonathan Cohn’s Sick belongs to the “60 Minutes” school of journalism: a series of sad human stories deployed to win an argument that is never quite explicitly stated.
Richard Hofstadter is a writer so famous that even people who have never read his books somehow feel they know what he had to say about “the paranoid style” and “anti-intellectualism in American life.”