“If you hate brunch, you probably just don’t want to get up in the morning,” says Jason Lock, the general manager at Coastal Kitchen on Capitol Hill, which has served brunch for nearly 30 years.
I’ll take it a step further and say that if you hate brunch, you’re probably just looking for something to complain about. And hey, I’m not against complaining — here I am complaining about the people who hate brunch! — I’m just saying you’re misguided.
This is an unsettling thriller which will not allow you to relax. Jo Spain keeps gleefully shifting the goalposts, leaving us on tenterhooks. Her approach is surprisingly stealthy. Very little is as it seems in this exceptionally skillful and deceptive novel.
Raise your hand if you’ve heard of Anne O’Hare McCormick. I hadn’t, and as the director of Radcliffe’s Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, which holds peerless collections documenting pioneers in print journalism, I could have, and definitely should have. Brooke Kroeger’s compendious and lively “Undaunted: How Women Changed American Journalism” introduced me to her.
More significantly, Jonathan Strassfeld has given us a first-rate history of American philosophy that reminds us that the “best” ideas don’t simply win out on their merits. Rather, they often come to be labeled as such after their influence is established through the vagaries of institutional contingency. At a time when the line dividing the continental and analytic traditions appears to be wearing thin, we would do well to heed this injunction for historical reflection.