In this collage of critical reflections, written in the tradition of
the short essay running through Francis Bacon and Roland Barthes, the
novelist, philosopher, and former New York Times Opinion staffer Mark de
Silva looks into matters of both common curiosity and special concern in
America today: technological evolution, virtuality, terrorism, the
future of the self, the individual's place in a globalized society, the
species' place in the natural world, the state of the arts, and the
animadversions of the sciences.
Above all, Points of Attack is a handbook of the ways of the good life
in bad times, and an inoculation against presumption in an era when the
axioms of liberal democratic life have come undone and the end of
history once again appears a long way off.