SOURCE: Pinsker, Sanford. “More News from Mr. Epstein's Neighborhood.” Virginia Quarterly Review 64, no. 2 (spring 1988): 342-48.

In the following review, Pinsker delineates the scope of Epstein's essays in Once More Around the Block and finds his pose as a “regular guy” to be an affectation.

Mr. Epstein likes to think of the pieces he publishes first in American Scholar (a journal he edits) and then between hard covers as “familiar essays,” and that, of course, is his privilege. But this is a case where one buys one's subtitle at a certain cost. After all, the very term “familiar essay” has a dusty ring about it, one that would harken us back to the days of Montaigne or Hazlitt. On this side of the Atlantic only captives of English 101 and antiquarians curl up with discourses on friendship.

What is astounding, then, is that readers who are neither college freshmen nor...