Few, if any, historians have brought such insight, wisdom, and empathy
to public discourse as Jill Lepore. Arriving at The New Yorker in
2005, Lepore, with her panoptical range and razor-sharp style, brought a
transporting freshness and a literary vivacity to everything from
profiles of long-dead writers to urgent constitutional analysis to an
unsparing scrutiny of the woeful affairs of the nation itself. The
astonishing essays collected in The Deadline offer a prismatic
portrait of Americans' techno-utopianism, frantic fractiousness, and
unprecedented--but armed--aimlessness. From lockdowns and race
commissions to Bratz dolls and bicycles, to the losses that haunt
Lepore's life, these essays again and again cross what she calls the
deadline, the "river of time that divides the quick from the dead."
Echoing Gore Vidal's United States in its massive intellectual
erudition, The Deadline, with its remarkable juxtaposition of the
political and the personal, challenges the very nature of the essay--and
of history--itself.
