Please Don't Remain Calm: Provocations and Commentaries

by Michael Kinsley

This selection of Michael Kinsley's trenchant editorial writing in Slate (and elsewhere) since 1995 covers the end of the Clinton era (Monica, impeachment, etc.) and two terms of George W. Bush (9/11, the War on Terror, Iraq, etc.).During this time Kinsley left Washington for Seattle and founded Slate , was opinion editor of the Los Angeles Times , underwent brain surgery for Parkinson's disease, and had other adventures that are reflected here. Although...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393066541
• ISBN13: 9780393066548
• Release Date: April 2008
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 368 Pages
• Weight: 1.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 6.5" x 9.5"

Customer Reviews

A triumph of true wit and erudition.

Though they may read like opinion or satire, these sparkling essays are first and foremost, journalism: they inform. Michael Kinsley commands more facts than Al Franken's whiz-kid team of Harvard student researchers, wields a sharper rhetorical scalpel than either Lewis Lapham or Christopher Hitchens, and affects a gentler, warmer tone than even Garrison Keillor right as that scalpel goes in. Kinsley's magazine "The New Republic" lost me when it took that screeching right turn in the 90's; his appearances on NPR, with their magisterial equanimity, can come off as bland or even mealy-mouthed; but this collection is his triumph: the product of a broad, sober, splendid intellect confronting our absurd, horrid politics without once losing touch with reality.