PositiveThe Los Angeles Review of BooksLong Live Latin is less a popular history of the language, however, than an aesthete’s manifesto ... Todd [Portnowitz\'s] translation...ably captures Gardini’s bombast and fussiness alike ... more often, Gardini simply geeks out on rhetoric. His precise, writerly descriptions of the texts...are often exciting and infectious in themselves ... It’s his chapters about later Latin stylists, however, that this reader found most fascinating ... It might be churlish to ask a book as doggedly apolitical as Long Live Latin to gesture toward the current rhetorical moment. Gardini is too besotted with the ancients to waste many words on the white noise of contemporary politicians or to draw comparisons between the fall of the Roman Republic and the depredations suffered by both democracy and discourse in the 21st century ... Part of the appeal of a book like Long Live Latin is the promise of escaping the tumult and babble of our contemporary discourse.
Rob Spillman
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewWith wry humor and wonder, Spillman beautifully captures the deadpan hedonism of the East Berliners and the city’s sense of infinite possibility, which, to his frustration, never quite imbues him with his own artistic compulsion. (One is reminded as much of Cyril Connolly’s anti-bildungsroman Enemies of Promise as Nick Hornby’s culture-besotted High Fidelity.)
