SOURCE: Dirda, Michael. “First Person Singular.” Washington Post Book World 25, no. 30 (23 July 1995): 3.

In the following excerpted review, Dirda commends stylistic aspects of the essays in With My Trousers Rolled.

Essays, nowadays, nearly always come disguised as something else. They may be reviews of books or introductions to them; magazine articles or newspaper columns; literary travel pieces, personal memoirs, New Yorker profiles or “casuals”; even some of the more old-fashioned forms of cultural criticism. At heart most of this occasional writing secretly aspires to the permanence of hardcovers—and to a subtitle that proclaims “selected prose” or “literary essays.”

Paradoxically, however, the authors of these august-sounding collections always remain journalists, critics, scholars, nature writers, scientists and poets. Nobody inks in “essayist” on his or her passport. Demand that educated readers name a living American essayist and those who don't look poleaxed will probably all stammer “Joseph Epstein.”

With My...