SOURCE: "Collecting Cultural Evidence," in The Gettysburg Review, Vol. 1, No. 2, Spring, 1988, pp. 351-9.

In the following excerpt, Pinsker evaluates Birkerts's style, range, and method in An Artificial Wilderness.

Sven Birkerts, a voracious reader and reviewer, is "burdened" neither by the venerable reputations that Professors Marx and Brooks enjoy nor by the tortured jargon that infects so many of his contemporaries. He writes with independence and with style and surely deserves the citation he recently won from the National Book Critics Circle for excellence in reviewing.

An Artificial Wilderness is a collection of some thirty-nine pieces written over the last seven years. Birkerts is, above all else, a wide-ranging, extraordinarily catholic reader. Indeed, his table of contents reads like an international Who's Who of the most interesting twentieth-century writers: Robert Musil, Joseph Roth, Osip Mandelstam, Marguerite Duras, Michel Tournier, Primo Levy, Lars Gustafsson, V. S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, Julio...