Haven’t we heard enough from [Will] by now? Shouldn’t the octogenarian hang up his quill and ink blotter? ... The nearly 200 columns collected here confirm that Will is still a brilliant prose craftsman as well as a keen and dyspeptic political observer. Love him or loathe him, there is no one else like him ... He channels the sinewy, provocative and feline style of his journalistic model Murray Kempton, the buoyant cosmopolitan conservatism of his mentor William F. Buckley and the world-weary, scholarly wisdom of his political beau ideal Daniel Patrick Moynihan. An artisan of the aphorism as well as a luminous book reviewer and obituarist, he is a considerably more complicated thinker than the tweedy, bow-tied conservative persona he tends to project on TV ... Much of the book is given over to his denunciations of the ideas, language and scholarship of left-wing academics ... Will can’t be accused of overlooking the darker aspects of America’s history ... But his optimism elides into Panglossianism with his applause for Justice Clarence Thomas’s 2009 call to gut the Voting Rights Act ... There is simply no way to reconcile Will’s praise for the Voting Rights Act as marking the true end of slavery with the Republican Party’s ongoing suppression of minority votes.
[An] erudite and eclectic collection of [Will's] published columns ... Will’s eulogies of conservative leaders...are particularly rich and insightful ... hough his dismissals of climate change and economic inequality feel out of touch, Will is a consistently provocative and articulate opinion-maker. Fans will delight in this expansive survey of his recent judgments.
An overstuffed collection of the conservative columnist’s reviews and rarefied reflections from the Washington Post ... A gentleman scholar and scold, Will continues to wield his sharp, discerning prose.
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