With My Trousers Rolled: Familiar Essays

Dust jacket notes: "Over the last twenty years Joseph Epstein has published more than eighty familiar essays. Taken together, these essays constitute a continuing autobiography. Although the tone in this collection, his fifth - which owes its title to T. S. Eliot's 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock' - is still highly amused, these new essays also strike a chord that's slightly elegiac. Offering reflections on his increased maturity both as a writer and as a man, Epstein admits to feeling more and more on the periphery of contemporary life - 'Nicely Out of It,' and not at all minding this. 'Decline and Blumenthal' is his take on the endemic slippage of standards in all realms of life. In 'Here to Buy Mink,' he conveys his love and admiration for the remarkable woman who was his mother."