The essay, a form of reasoned inquiry, was the perfect vessel for postwar reckoning in America. Essays were attentively read and hotly debated as writers grappled with the vulnerability of democracy, the coalescence of pro--civil rights and antiwar movements, aesthetic revolutions, and enormous social change. In the second volume of a trilogy, following The Glorious American Essay (2020), Lopate offers timelessly provocative, now freshly relevant, essays, including Walter Lippmann's 1947 warning "that there was no guarantee that the rule of the people would not in its turn be despotic, arbitrary, corrupt, unjust, and unwise." James Agee surveys persistent injustice. Albert Murray explores the culture-shaping blues idiom. Mary McCarthy's account of a train journey reveals the deep entrenchment of anti-Semitism and white supremacy. James Baldwin considers American racism while staying in a small Swiss village. Showcasing New York intellectuals, renegade New Journalists, theologians, scientists, and art critics, Lopate's gathering offers the finely forged thoughts and eloquence of Irving Howe, Norman Mailer, Martin Luther King, Jr., Flannery O'Connor, Seymour Krim, Gore Vidal, Rachel Carson, and Joan Didion. The third anthology will extend to the present.

In selecting these 40 essays, Lopate's (To Show and To Tell: The Craft of Literary Nonfiction) goal was to convey the quality and variety of texts published over a 25-year period. The collection begins with James Agee's "The Nation: Democratic Vistas," which explains the expectations of some Americans at the end of World War II. Other topics include religion, such as Reinhold Niebuhr's "Humor and Faith," and by contrast, Richard Hofstadter's "The Paranoid Style in American Politics," which reflects on religion's responses to U.S. elections. Although published in 1964, Hofstadter's essay begins with a sentence that could have been written in the 21st century: "American politics have often been an arena for angry minds." The collection includes essays by James Baldwin ("Stranger in the Village") and Martin Luther King Jr. ("Letter from a Birmingham Jail"), but it mostly focuses on white male authors like Paul Goodman and Saul Bellow. Other essays include Norman Mailer's thoughts on Jackie Kennedy and Rachel Carson's condemnation of pesticides. VERDICT In this collection, readers might see the value of the essay format as a way to share opinions. Lopate's collection is a worthwhile slice of the history of the essay and its lasting contribution to American writing.--Joyce Sparrow, Helenwood, TN