PositiveThe New Yorker... wide-ranging, subtly ambitious ... [Beckerman] wears his expertise lightly, relying on brisk narratives interspersed with mostly familiar citations ... These vignettes don’t always yield generalizable principles ... doesn’t aim to provide us with one weird trick that explains all of history. It identifies a few notable discursive communities and brings us inside them, deriving its impact not from categorical takeaways but from the more ambiguous power of narrative ... is at its best when it gives us glimpses into discursive communities without imputing to them more than it is possible to know.
