Waiting for the Barbarians: Essays from the Classics to Pop Culture Hardcover - 2012

Media reviews

"Mendelsohn is a deep thinker with insightful charm.  All fans of intelligent thought on popular culture will appreciate his commentary." —Library Journal

"Mendelsohn’s work is absolutely vital in both senses of the word—it breaths with an exciting intelligence often absent in similar but stodgier writing, and it should be required reading for anyone interested in dissecting culture, or who simply find themselves thinking about the complex flaws of an almost-good movie a week after leaving the cinema. In the book, his scope includes both the high- and middlebrow….Taken together, the collection offers a sort of defense of the modern age of culture. If a true-blue classicist can engage with the current zeitgeist using the full weight of his intellect and without an iota of demoralization, than the rest of us have no excuse." —Nicholas Mancusi, The Daily Beast

"Even more than his earlier books about literature and culture, it displays his characteristic strengths of style and judgment and his distinctive and engaging voice. As always, he is surprising yet convincing when he praises what practically everyone else condemns, or sees through the pretensions and confusions of books and dramas that everyone else admires." —Edward Mendelson, The New York Review of Books

"Waiting for the Barbarians adds up to more than the sum of its parts, evidencing an impressive range, depth and nobility of mind…. Mendelsohn is a trained classics scholar, from which much of his intellectual authority still derives: witness his brilliantly illuminating, lucid essays on Homer, Sappho, Herodotus and Horace. He writes about pop culture with equal enthusiasm." —Phillip Lopate, San Francisco Chronicle

"Waiting for the Barbarians, his latest collection of essays and reviews, is full of prose in praise of Horace, of Sappho, of Homer, and of the ghosts of all the above across all of popular culture. It makes it clear he is now, and has been for some time, the finest critic alive." —John Freeman, Toronto Star

“Another top-notch collection of previously published criticism from Mendelsohn." —Kirkus Reviews

"[Mendelsohn] is a brilliant storyteller, influenced by the Greek masters he so admires…" —The Times of London

"A joy from start to finish…a wonderfully eclectic set of musings on the state of contemporary culture and the enduring richness of classical literature." —Publishers Weekly

"A classicist by training and a critic by trade, he begins with a challenging subject and gloriously complicates it by drawing on his erudition, acumen, and passion for precision and bedrock truth….These are works of brilliant and soulful criticism." —Booklist

"Mendelsohn…is a gifted and entertaining writer. His prose is gorgeous and lyrical and his subjects are smartly considered and freshly revealed." —Vanity Fair