This memoir was hard to put down. Goodheart courageously examines and reveals his past, his relationships to family, colleagues and friends with an honest study of a secular Jew growing up in America in the second half of the 20th Century. Left wing politics, furious clashes with the intellectual establishment, a high adventure journey through the mind, its all here packed into 262 pages of vivid prose.

Goodheart has long been recognized as well-nigh a national treasure for his long cultural view and bracing skepticism re: skeptical cultural critics themselves. His courageous resistance to fashionable "interventions" is refreshing; the reader of his *Reign* feels that s/he has consumed a kind of intellectual tonic. I'm not so old as to have forgotten why I got mixed up in the literary-biz in the first place, and I can honestly say that Goodheart's chapters on Matthew Arnold made me laugh, made me cry, made me want to care about people. I'll be up all night turning the pages of his next book, and I'll be telling all my friends.