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Lingua Franca covered the intellectual life of the 1990s--when American scholars took to the public stage as never before--with wit and passion and helped establish many of the leading voices in American journalism today.

Dedicated to the proposition that academia can compete for interest with Hollywood and Washington, Lingua Franca explained, in depth, the ideas of the decade--and told some of its least likely stories. In Quick Studies a physicist humiliates the gurus of postmodernism in an astonishing hoax; the "Dirty Harry" of literary theory renounces his calling; a Romanian dissident is assassinated in a faculty lavatory; and a leading feminist faces charges of sexual harassment.

Anyone concerned with the key debates of our time, and their idiosyncratic debaters, cannot afford to miss this book. It is nothing less than a collective portrait of the American intellectual in its native habits.