The Last Innocent White Man in America

John Leonard is one of America's wittiest and most incisive cultural critics. You've cherished his writings in publications as diverse as The Nation, New York Newsday, and New York Magazine, and you've tuned in with millions of other Americans to his weekly commentary as media critic on CBS Sunday Morning. Now you can read his collected essays in The Last Innocent White Man in America, his latest collection of criticism. Here you'll find assessments on an array of subjects - from America's fear and loathing of the Sixties to Nixon's secret love affair with Elvis; from the Reagan gerontocracy's "theology of greed" to the Gulf War "turkey shoot"; from riots in Los Angeles to "ethnic cleansing" at the Republican Convention in Houston; from censorship and homelessness to career assessments of writers as diverse as Toni Morrison, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Gunter Grass. Far more than simple political commentary, The Last Innocent White Man in America is a passionate marriage of politics and literature which transcends the daily headlines to get at how we imagine ourselves in history. And whether he's writing about bankers or AIDS, Congress or television, Salman Rushdie or Ed Koch, Leonard will make you stop, think, and laugh. His essays, says Charles Kuralt, "full of metaphors and allusions, always leave me dazzled". He is, according to William F. Buckley, Jr., "the funniest writer in America, the hottest epigrammatist in the language, with prose as rich as Rimsky-Korsakov", Leonard himself is an unrepentant liberal, dissident, scourge and media critic par excellence.