Jason Epstein's imagination stretches from primeval man, arranging 'meaningful phonemes to the beat of stone upon stone or to the sound of hollowed logs used as drums', to the impact on book business, eons hence, of 'the global village green . . . undisciplined, polymorphous and polyglot, as has been our fate and our milieu ever since the divine autocracy showed its muscle by toppling the monolingual Tower of Babel'. And yet, for all the grandeur of these moments, Epstein's perspective will strike cis-Atlantic readers as myopic.

LRB 5 July 2001 | PDF Download