SOURCE: Pritchard, William H. “Reading Joseph Epstein.” Hudson Review 48, no. 3 (autumn 1995): 493-98.

In the following review, Pritchard places Epstein's work within the literary context of the familiar essay and finds With My Trousers Rolled very readable.

In early 1975 Joseph Epstein became editor of The American Scholar, and, with his second issue, began to write a quarterly column under the name “Aristides.” Aristides informed us that he would comment “from time to time … on matters of cultural and intellectual interest,” also that he was in no way related to that Aristides whom the citizens of Athens, tired of hearing him referred to as “the Just,” had ostracized. Mr. Epstein's plan to share this column with other contributors never materialized; he has now written about eighty such columns and seems not to worry about possible ostracism. His first collection of them, Familiar Territory: Observations on American Life (1979), was in due...