Jun 21, 2012 The Daily Beast - Malcolm Jones
Jill Lepore’s ‘The Mansion of Happiness’ examines the stages of life from its beginning—a point pushed earlier and earlier—to the grave—or beyond. Malcolm Jones reviews the imaginative book.
Jill Lepore’s subtitle for The Mansion of Happiness is A History of Life and Death. A more precise description might be, “A series of thoughtful ruminations, observations, and clarifications about various aspects of life and death, mostly as seen through American eyes.” That wording might not sell as many books, but it gets closer to the playfully intelligent if slightly scattershot essays in this work. If you picked up The Mansion of Happiness thinking you’ll be reading a comprehensive history of its subject matter, you’re in for some disappointment. If, on the other hand, you come expecting to be entertained, educated, and given several helpful new ways to think about the stages of life and what lies beyond—and anyone familiar with Lepore’s work knows what a sure bet that is—you’re in for a good time.
A Harvard historian and a frequent contributor to The New Yorker, Lepore has mastered the neat trick of writing imaginatively and often humorously for a general audience without checking her scholarly swing. While she’s surely the smartest person in most rooms she enters, she wears her intelligence lightly and almost never pulls rank. Her last book, The Whites of Their Eyes, an examination of the Tea Party that concentrated on the group’s tenuous sense of history, could easily have been a hatchet job. Instead, Lepore took the trouble to actually go out and talk to party members, and in those meetings she never condescended or mocked them, which is not to say that there was much left of their arguments when she got done.
‘The Mansion of Happiness’ by Jill Lepore. 320 pp. Knopf. $28. (Suzanne Kreiter, The Boston Globe / Getty Images)
Full review at The Daily Beast
A Harvard historian and a frequent contributor to The New Yorker, Lepore has mastered the neat trick of writing imaginatively and often humorously for a general audience without checking her scholarly swing. While she’s surely the smartest person in most rooms she enters, she wears her intelligence lightly and almost never pulls rank. Her last book, The Whites of Their Eyes, an examination of the Tea Party that concentrated on the group’s tenuous sense of history, could easily have been a hatchet job. Instead, Lepore took the trouble to actually go out and talk to party members, and in those meetings she never condescended or mocked them, which is not to say that there was much left of their arguments when she got done.
Full review at The Daily Beast
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