As a rich successor to his Crimes of Culture (Autonomedia, 1996), Political Essays (Autonomedia, 2006), Toward Secession (Autonomedia, 2008), Skeptical Essays (Autonomedia, 2010), and A Person of Letters (Autonomedia, 2014), this book contains critical essays unavailable elsewhere, not even on the internet, some from fugitive periodicals, others previously unpublished, with indispensable critical intelligence about various subjects that have engaged Richard Kostelanetz, the provocative American critic of art, literature, music, politics, culture, and more.
Among the interests he examines with dead-on accuracy and quotable wit are Barack Obama, the Osama bin Laden hoax, Mayor Bloomberg, Affirmative Action, the FBI and the CIA, Islam in America, Joe Paterno, J.C. Oates, John Updike, Virgil Thomson, John Cage, the higher anti-Semitism, the Boston bombers, the Dannemora prison breakout, Conceptual Literature, the renegade publisher Samuel Roth, commie schools, and the sexual proclivities of Bill Clinton and Donald Trump, among other subjects rarely considered so critically. His most controversial essays radically reexamine the liberal myth on personal self-defense weapons.