SOURCE: Hart, Jeffrey. “The Metropolitan Spirit.” National Review 43, no. 14 (12 August 1991): 52-3.

In the following positive review of A Line Out for a Walk, Hart compares the essays of Epstein and Michel de Montaigne, creator of the personal essay genre.

Joseph Epstein, editor of The American Scholar and a professor at Northwestern University, is a very able literary critic in the tradition of Edmund Wilson, and he is a master of the genre of the familiar essay. In the latter role, of which A Line Out for a Walk provides excellent examples, those familiar with his work do not blink when he is compared with Hazlitt, Lamb, or even Montaigne. As in the present volume, he can take an apparently minor subject, such as “The Gentle Art of the Resounding Put-down,” or the health-fascist campaign against smoking, and seductively involve us in a small masterpiece.

Like Montaigne he writes...