What is striking about these dozen stories is how MacLaverty, 78, deals with the theme of encroaching mortality. Virtually every one features death and decay in some form, whether implicitly or explicitly, giving a profundity to tales that might otherwise feel less weighty than some of his earlier work.
It’s truly hard to provide a short description of “Out on a Limb,” Andrew Sullivan’s newest book. Yes, it’s a collection of his essays, stretching through 32 confused and contentious years of American history. But because it’s Sullivan, and Sullivan was and is a unique and always controversial presence in American politics and culture, to call the book a mere “collection of essays” is to do it a grave injustice. Perhaps it’s better to call it a series of journeys.
Philosophers’ lives are, of course, irresistible. They tend to be bestrewn with dysfunction. Something about the gulf between the life of the mind and the life of the person leaves us marveling at the cost of luminescent thinking (or of practical drudgery, depending on your side). Nietzsche was lonely, spurned, star-crossed. Schopenhauer feuded with elderly women, comforted only by his poodles. Heidegger … well. But Arendt, while “a magnificent stage diva,” (McCarthy’s words) when compared to the theorists and scholars of the Frankfurt School, was extraordinarily disciplined. She was charmingly self-aware. “She was too reverential about the great thinkers to claim ‘originality’ in philosophy itself,” wrote Alfred Kazin, also her friend. “Her distinctive procedure, which she must have learned in German seminars, was to circle round and round the great names, performing a ‘critique’ in their name when she disowned a traditional position.”