Rating: 
Summary: A rehash
Review: Terry Teachout's new biography is largely a rehash of Fred Hobson's biography of Mencken and to complete the feeling of déjà vu, the same controversies that greeted Hobson's book swirl around this one as well. Unlike Lord Byron or de Sade, Mencken led a life that was fairly bourgeois and apparently book reviewers resent it, thus playing up his alleged anti-Semitism. It is something of a fad these days to unmask literary anti-Semites and those who do it sometimes make themselves look foolish. One dunce who reviewed this book for the Seattle Times and compared Mencken unfavorably to Voltaire was apparently unaware of a large body of criticism condemning Voltaire for his anti-Semitism. Teachout himself is apologetic about Mencken's attitudes to the Jews, but doesn't go far enough in pardoning him. Part of the demonizing of Mencken these days might be attributed to the fact that American society is still intolerant of a critical attitude to religion. Mencken was indeed critical of Judaism. However, as readers of "Treatise on Gods" know, Mencken was also critical of Christianity and Islam. A rationalist to the core, Mencken had little time for people who believed in the supernatural. He detested the religious impulse in Christians, Jews and Muslims alike. As for those who claim that Mencken is racially prejudice against the Jews, they will have to explain away the fact that, as Teachout shows, Mencken had many close Jewish friends and that he used harsh language toward everyone (the English, the Irish, African-Americans, Italians), not just against the Jews. As so often with the genteel, the critics of Mencken have focused almost entirely on his manner of writing than rather than the substance of his writing. He argued quite forcefully for a humane foreign policy. Unlike the timid Walter Lippman, Mencken urged the US government to take in Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany. For a man who is so often characterized as nasty, he was surprisingly pacific in some of his politics: he was against participation in both world wars. Much has been made about Teachout's use of Mencken's unpublished writings for this biography and many reviewers have implied that these writings reveal his dark side. Actually, these unpublished writings appear to reveal some new facts, not new prejudices. If Mencken said nasty things in the diaries, a look at his published writings will show that he was nasty there as well. By the way, he could also be nice sometimes too. Again it's just that Mencken's style is far more biting than anything allowed in today's journalism, which is apparently stocked with aspiring political consultants and public relations people. The best account of the events of Mencken's life is still his Days books (Happy Days, Newspaper Days, Heathen Days). The collection of his newspaper columns, The Impossible Mencken, is better reading than this biography and a good record of Mencken's opinions on the issues of the day.
Rating: 
Summary: Frank assessment of a brilliant, yet flawed man.....
Review: Terry Teachout's new book about H.L. Mencken is a revelation, largely because it is no mere hagiography; nor does it attempt to smear Mencken as a one-dimensional bigot. Instead, Teachout admits that while yes, Mencken was anti-Semetic, often petty, and sometimes out of touch (especially from about 1935 on), he was also a brilliant writer, master critic, and unparalleled wit in the Mark Twain tradition. Teachout provides a nice balance of the personal and the public man (using previously unpublished letters and journal entries) so that it is often the case that Mencken's own words indict him (rather than the P.C. crowd taking things out of context). What we are left with is a man still worthy of admiration (at the very least, for a journalistic style that is unrivaled), but one who deserves to be further scrutinized for his contradictions. Bravo, Teachout, for giving us a living, breathing Mencken rather than a caricature.
Rating:
Summary: A great review of a great man
Review: When I first picked up "The Skeptic" I was a bit, errr, skeptical: barely 400 pages to cover the 40-odd working years of America's greatest 20th century journalist? It didn't seem enough, especially when long-forgotten literary figures often get biographies twice as thick. But it didn't take many pages to convince me. Teachout has delivered a model of concise but enthralling biography. He gives all the essentials of Mencken's life, and a good flavor of his times, without wallowing in matters only tangentially related to the main story line. Besides telling the story of Mencken's life better than it's ever been told before, Teachout delivers the most balanced and convincing critique of Mencken's thinking that I have ever seen. He doesn't slight Mencken's anti-semitism but doesn't exaggerate its importance either. He shows why Mencken's arguments often weren't very convincing, but also why Mencken continues to attract readers a half-century after his demise. He may not have been the Sage of Baltimore, but Mencken was a peerless prose stylist who deserves to remembered as one of the finest writers America has ever produced. Although Teachout modestly bills his book as "a life" it will go down as the definitive biography of Mencken.
| 
