SOURCE: Roberts, Rex. Review of With My Trousers Rolled, by Joseph Epstein. Insight on the News 11, no. 22 (5 June 1995): 25.

In the following review, Roberts offers a mixed assessment of With My Trousers Rolled.

As one of the premier practitioners of the “familiar essay,” Joseph Epstein has achieved a certain celebrity, although he protests any such status; without doubt, he is well-known in literary and academic circles as editor of the American Scholar, the quarterly review of the Phi Beta Kappa Society, and as a contributor to Commentary and other journals. Possessing, as he says, “a naturally conservative temperament”—a scion of Chicago's “uncultivated middle class” who went on to earn a degree at the University of Chicago—he is both the erudite scholar and everyman, sprinkling his essays with references to the Greeks on one page, Groucho Marx on the next.

In his fifth collection of essays, With My...