William Eaton’s Surviving the Twenty-First Century offers a mind and sensibility doing its best work. Engaged, non-doctrinaire, well-read, independent-minded, pressurized toward the good and serious questions, Eaton shows us that in an age of media distraction and academic specialization a thinking person can still make a path. His freelance ruminations are provocative—they invite the reader into the game.

—Sven Birkerts, author of The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age

William Eaton has put together a collection of essays full of insights and very enjoyable to read. What other writer could find a bond among Tolstoy’s Yasnaya Polyana, the clothing of middle-class Moscow women, Camus’ Oran, “negative” vs. “positive” rights, a Russian landlady named Ludmilla, iTunes, and LBJ’s “Great Society” speech. In the Eaton world such linkages are everywhere. But it takes his guidance for us to see them.

—Nahid Rachlin, author of Persian Girls (memoir), Foreigner and Jumping Over Fire

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William Eaton finds arresting themes in unusual places—gazing at deer becomes a site for a meditation on natural science. Coffee in Paris becomes a site for exploring wanderlust and the allure of home. Coffee with a teenager becomes a site for probing silence. The writing is masterful and wonderfully absorbing.

—Edward F. Mooney, author of On Søren Kierkegaard: Dialogue, Polemics, Lost Intimacy and Time

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