Prejudices, Second Series

H.L. Mencken returns with his second collection of essays, and he is absolutely merciless. The great satirist turns his gimlet eye on American culture in 1920 and finds nearly everything wanting: the timid journalists, the puritanical Prohibition crusaders, the philistines who mistake sentiment for art. He dismantles the nation's sacred cows with surgical precision and gleeful contempt. But beneath the savagery lies a genuine fury at how Americans have traded genuine culture for comfort, real thought for platitudes. Mencken writes about love and mating with the same barbed wit he brings to politics, exposing the absurd rituals and comfortable lies that men and women tell each other. This is criticism that bites, that refuses to温柔, that insists America could be so much more than it is. For readers who want to feel intelligently angry about the world, this remains electrifying.