SOURCE: Mesic, Penelope. “The Heat and the Intimacy.” Chicago Tribune Books (28 May 1995): 3.

In the following review, Mesic contrasts Barbara Ehrenreich's essay collection The Snarling Citizen with Epstein's With My Trousers Rolled.

Other than a review, these two collections of essays by Joseph Epstein [With My Trousers Rolled] and Barbara Ehrenreich [The Snarling Citizen] deserve something more closely resembling a National Geographic Special. For no team of Sherpa-led climbers or divers finning through the crannies of a coral reef, ever discovered more diverse or improbable life forms thriving in a single culture. Well-adapted to the hot, volcanic slopes of national politics we find the highly colored clusters of barbed remarks known as commentarius Ehrenreichii. At a more rarefied elevation, flowering profusely in a sheltered nook, are the exquisite blooms of Epstein's mots, called anglophile's necktie.

Ehrenreich is passionate, public and politically engaged, with a style as subtle as a...