‘The Frenchmen: Or, My Life in Theory’ by Emily Eakin
“It’s tempting to read The Frenchmen as atonement,” said Dayna Tortorici in The New Yorker. Some 22 years ago, author Emily Eakin betrayed one of the passions of her youth when she was working at The New York Times and she signed off on an obit for Jacques Derrida that ran under a headline dismissing the French philosopher as “abstruse.” Just a decade earlier, Eakin had been a devotee of the post-structuralists, the cohort of mostly French, mostly male thinkers who ignited a 1980s fad that had literature students at many of America’s top universities parroting the ideas that all meaning is contingent and words can’t be trusted. Eakin, who caught the “theory” bug as a Harvard undergrad, was pursuing a Ph.D. when she finally shook it. But was the entire movement nonsense? In her engaging new book, “Eakin argues persuasively that it wasn’t.”
Not that Eakin is blind to her subjects’ many flaws, said Laura Miller in Slate. “Much of the entertainment offered by The Frenchmen comes from the tea Eakin spills on men who were once presented as disembodied monuments.” Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, and Louis Althusser were all “narcissistic, imperious, and histrionic—that is, they were very French.” In Eakin’s colorful character sketches, “only Roland Barthes comes off as remotely appealing.” Theory’s long downfall began around the time Eakin bought in, when it was revealed in 1987 that one of its stars, the Belgian-born Yale professor Paul de Man, had expressed antisemitic views while writing for a Nazi-affiliated newspaper during World War II. But while Eakin tired of theory, don’t expect her to join the critics on the Left and Right who remain eager to label post-structuralism absurd. “It taught us a new way to think,” she says. “Be skeptical. Be alert. Pay very close attention. Beware political claims posing as timeless truths.”
As Eakin details, the battles over theory weren’t confined to academia, said Jonathan Derbyshire in the Financial Times. Philosopher Allan Bloom seemed to have the post-structuralists in mind when he railed against the influence of despairing European thinkers in The Closing of the American Mind, a 1987 best seller that remains a cornerstone of the Right’s case against American universities. Eakin isn’t afraid to admit that theory’s allure was its countercultural energy, said Geoff Shullenberger in Compact. She writes about her youthful indoctrination “with self-satirizing flair.” But when she defends theory’s luminaries, I can’t agree that their insistence that we vigorously question every story we’re told can help us recapture a sense of the common good in this moment. “Their imperative—to deconstruct—has been followed all too faithfully, for too long.”
‘Catch the Devil: A True Story of Murder, Deception, and Injustice on the Gulf Coast’ by Pamela Colloff
“Though its subtitle suggests true crime, Catch the Devil is by no means your typical true-crime book,” said Ted Conover in The New York Times. It focuses on not a killer but a snitch: a con man named Paul Skalnik who may well have set a record when, between 1978 and 1987, he provided testimony against jail mates that helped win more than 34 convictions and landed four men on death row. “The problem is that much, even most, of his testimony appears to have been invented, and some of those he helped convict were almost certainly not guilty.” And while the presence of such an unusual villain makes Catch the Devil an “engrossing” read, “the public policy implications make it important.”
Author Pamela Colloff, an investigative reporter for ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine, focuses on an “appalling” Florida murder case, said Kristen Martin in NPR.org. In 1986, when prosecutors failed to win a death-penalty conviction for a man who’d killed a 14-year-old female hitchhiker, they turned to Skalnik to manufacture a death-penalty case against the killer’s roommate. Skalnik obliged, reporting that jail mate Jim Dailey confessed to him that he’d stabbed the girl dozens of times. Despite a lack of other evidence against him, Dailey has since spent nearly 40 years on death row, and Colloff’s “cinematic telling of this case serves to highlight the potentially fatal consequences of a criminal legal system that is more concerned with securing convictions than determining the truth and delivering justice.”
While reading about Dailey’s plight is agonizing, said Barbara Spindel in The Wall Street Journal, “Colloff’s rendering of Skalnik is chilling.” An unrepentant liar whose rap sheet included sexual assault of a child, he died without admitting to Colloff that he’d ever traded false testimony for lenient punishment of his own crimes. In fact, Colloff came to believe he saw her merely as his latest potential mark. A reader can’t help share her revulsion against him as well as the system that supercharged the impact of his lies. “It’s unconscionable that Dailey continues to await execution. Equally disturbing are the failings of the justice system that keep him on death row.”