SOURCE: A review of An Artificial Wilderness, in World Literature Today, Vol. 63, No. 3, Summer, 1988, p. 515.

In the following review, Brown appreciates the way Birkerts treats "literature as literature" in An Artificial Wilderness, outlining the contents of the book.

Sven Birkerts began his career as a member of that menaced species, the bookseller whose passion is "the unpunished vice of reading," the bookseller who is also a talented man (or woman, like Sylvia Beach) of letters and whose shop is no Walden or Crown supermarket of perishable print but the equivalent of a literary salon. He carries on the tradition of an Edmund Wilson and writes, not for the specialist, but for the cultivated general reader. He deplores the jargon, the unreadability of much academic criticism. He insists that "literature is worth nothing if it can not help us make sense of our historical circumstance." He regrets that so...