How Beautiful it is and How Easily it Can be Broken: Essays

Whether he's on Broadway or at the movies, considering a new bestseller or revisiting a literary classic, Daniel Mendelsohn's judgments over the past fifteen years have provoked and dazzled with their deep erudition, disarming emotionality, and tart wit. Now "How Beautiful It Is And How Easily It Can Be Broken" reveals all at once the enormous stature of Mendelsohn's achievement and demonstrates why he is considered one of our greatest critics. Writing with a lively intelligence and arresting originality, he brings his distinctive combination of scholarly rigor and conversational ease to bear across eras, cultures, and genres, from Roman games to video games. His interpretations of our most talked-about films--from the work of Pedro Almodovar to "Brokeback Mountain," from "United 93" and "World Trade Center" to "300," "Marie Antoinette," and "The Hours"--have sparked debate and changed the way we watch movies. Just as stunning and influential are his dispatches on theater and literature, from "The Producers" to Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex, from "The Lovely Bones" to the works of Harold Pinter. Together these thirty brilliant and engaging essays passionately articulate the themes that have made Daniel Mendelsohn a crucial voice in today's cultural conversation: the aesthetic and indeed political dangers of imposing contemporary attitudes on the great classics; the ruinous effect of sentimentality on the national consciousness in the post-9/11 world; the vital importance of the great literature of the past for a meaningful life in the present. "How Beautiful It Is And How Easily It Can Be Broken" makes it clear that no other contemporary thinker is as engaged with as manyaspects of our culture and its influences as Mendelsohn is, and no one practices the vanishing art of popular criticism with more acuity, humor, and feeling.