Since 2001 The Common Review has published essays about the books and ideas that matter. Whether the topic is women and Islam or the pleasures of Proust, we are committed to tough, street-smart prose that will challenge, amuse, and sometimes offend—all in the service of building the most thoughtful community of readers in America today. Scroll down to view PDFs of selected articles from the Spring 2008 issue of the magazine. Better yet, subscribe today ($17.95 for four issues) or pick up a copy of The Common Review at your local bookstore.

"A Manifesto for the Common Reader," by Daniel Born

If you join a book club, choose one where the primary agenda is the actual reading and discussion of the text, not the exchange of Key lime pie recipes, or the donning of blue or gray when reading Civil War narratives. Find readers interested in more than treacly inspirational books or recovery memoirs. Try to observe the first rule of Shared Inquiry: If you haven’t read the book, shut the hell up. Also try to avoid the literary salon whose members, as a New York Times article so eloquently detailed last February, work on their pole-dancing moves. Back to basics, people, back to basics. <<view PDF>>

Feature Articles

"The Big What If?: Giving Alternate History a Fair Shake," by Ian Williams

Combining the best of fantasy, science fiction, and historical fiction, alternate history brings a reader back in time to show the exact moments when specific events or individual decisions—even seemingly inconsequential ones—create a familiar, yet alternate, reality. And it is in the tension between what we know has come to pass and what the author offers us as a possibility that alternate history challenges our presuppositions about what victory or destiny—usually defined by the free and affluent—really mean. But this genre doesn’t only belong to writers of fiction. Writers and historians have been asking what if? questions for a long time. <<view article>>

"Mrs. Jellyby and Me," by Leslie Haynsworth

I have a problem. I am being oppressed by Charles Dickens. And the scary thing is that it’s been going on for a long time now, and for most of that time I didn’t even know it. Looking back, I can see that I’ve been in a sick, angry, passive-aggressive relationship with Dickens for at least fifteen years. But for a good thirteen of those years, I was in total denial. Only when things got really bad did I finally understand that there really was a problem— and that it wasn’t all my fault. <<view PDF>>

"No Confidence, No Competence," by Mark Bauerlein

Education’s End is a gloves-off challenge to American humanities professors. Few of them, Kronman declares, believe that humanities classrooms should host worthwhile, positive examinations of enduring, fundamental questions and values. Kronman presents his experience as a fitting template. Fundamental questions—“What is the meaning of life, what is living for . . .?”—drew him toward humanistic study, he says, and they are still at the heart of literature, philosophy, and art today. Marx won’t make young people better accountants, and Mary Shelley won’t make them better doctors. But the study of their works might help students probe the social meaning of commodities and the moral meaning of biotechnology. And college is pretty much the only place where that engagement can take place.<<view PDF>>

"The Company We Keep," by Stephen Hartnett

The CIA, as Tim Weiner shows in his new book, Legacy of Ashes: A Brief History of the CIA, has continued to do what it has done for decades: support dictators, falsify intelligence, lie to Congress, bury the facts, purchase politicians, fail the President, and sabotage the machinery of U.S. democracy. Based on hundreds of interviews with topranking intelligence officials—all cited by name (Weiner boasts that he uses “no anonymous sources, no blind quotations, no hearsay”)—and unprecedented access to previously classified CIA documents, and coming from a reporter with extensive, award-winning investigative experience, Legacy of Ashes thus arrives with the resounding stamp of authority. <<view PDF>>

From the Editor