What Are Intellectuals Good For? -- (with a Foreword by Scott McLemee)
Book description:
"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 consequences 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."
Why this is progressive/liberal: Scialabba is a good, old-fashioned thinker. And in this collection of essays he thinks about what it means to be an intellectual and what it means to be a man of the left. Worthwhile for anyone who enjoys careful thought.
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