SOURCE: Pinsker, Sanford. “Literary Culture and Its Watchdogs.” Georgia Review 52, no. 1 (spring 1998): 130-41.

In the following excerpted review, Pinsker contends that in Life Sentences Epstein discusses his subjects with complexity, sophistication, and compassion.

Joseph Epstein's Life Sentences: Literary Essays gives cultural rumination a very different face. If I suspect that Geoffrey Hartman is hardly a reader, closet or otherwise, of middlebrow books, I am sure that Epstein is not—and my evidence for this assumption is the nineteen essays he has cobbled into his latest collection. If Radway admits that she has always had trouble being the highbrow she once hoped to be, Epstein takes a very different tack: he is an unashamed autodidact, not only a self-educated reader but also one who conducts his education in public “by writing about things that, until I actually do write about them, I don't always really know all that much...