If you are interested in contemporary literature and are looking for intelligent direction, then [Language and Silence, a] collection of George Steiner's essays and reviews, is the book for you. Steiner has been mostly known for his two dazzlingly precocious works of scholarship, Tolstoy or Dostoevsky and The Death of Tragedy, but he now emerges as a cultural journalist who is as pertinent as he is erudite, a kind of latter-day Arthur Koestler. Language and Silence casts a bright and searching light into the murky disarray of current letters and literacy: it looks back to a darkness and disruption of Western culture that continues to plague and challenge the moral purpose of literature, among other fields, and it looks forward to possibilities of art and thought that may carry us beyond our broken heritage. It provides an articulate and comprehensive discussion of the impact of science and mass...