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October 24th, 2007 6:33 pm

Exclamations!!

One commenter has criticized my more-than-opccsional exclamatory style on this blog. Which helped me thingk it through. I think blogging is a naturally exclamatory form, meant to express the excitement of the moment (and I’ve always been an excitable boy). I get the most pleasure out of posts that feel like I’m calling up a friend and saying “Did you see THAT?!” Or if not the most pleasure, a pleasure that’s specific to blogging.

I’ve done what I consider thoughtful essays on this blog. But I’ve done what I thought were thoughtful essays in periodicals and in books. The blog form however,–or one form of the blog form, I know there are many varieties on the spectrum–seems to me particularly suited, designed to express the emotion of the moment and not read as if carved in stone. It’s riskier that way, but I think people in general know it’s meant to represent an instant response, often at least. They can tell when it is. And the exclamations help underline that. They do!

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Ron Rosenbaum

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BUY The Shakespeare Wars

Random House, September 2006
Electrifying. A spectacular book.
—Cynthia Ozick

…a thrilling personal confrontation…The Shakespeare Wars comes to us in waves of new revelations
—Billy Collins, former U.S. poet laureate

Acclaimed journalist Ron Rosenbaum wrestles with the weightiest issues of Shakespeare studies in a down-to-earth manner that readers will applaud.
—Publisher’s Weekly

Cultural journalism of the highest order.
—Kirkus Reviews

Timely not least for the economy and clarity with which he outlines the casus belli…with Rosenbaum’s dispatches we now have a better sense of what the fuss is about.
—John Sutherland, The Financial Times

BUY Explaining Hitler

A remarkable journey by one of the most original journalists and writers of our time.
—David Remnick

A work of importance and fascination.
—George Steiner, the [U.K.] Observer

A provacative work of cultural history that is as compelling as it is thoughtful, as readable as it is smart..Mr. Rosenbaum has made an important contribution to our understanding not just of Hitler, but of the cultural processes by which we try to come to terms with history as well... He has written an exciting, lucid book.
—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

Intriguing, thought provoking and intelligent.
—Ian Kershaw in The Guardian [U.k.]

Brilliant...restlessly probing and deeply intelligent.
—Lance Morrow, Time

In Explaining Hitler, profound historical questions spring urgently and hauntingly to life.
—Sam Tanenhaus

Cultural criticism served up as riveting narrative history
—Marc Fisher The Washington Post

BUY The Secret Parts of Fortune

Ron Rosenbaum is one of the great masters of the metaphysical detective story, a nonfiction writer in the spirit of Borges, Nabokov and Poe.
—Errol Morris (director of The Fog of War)

Few journalists inspire the kind of cult following that Rosenbaum has
—Scott McLemee Newsday

I plan on hanging Ron Rosenbaum’s ‘marriage proposal’ [column] in a prominent place. Should my husband begin to take me for granted, he will be reminded that I am not without options.
—Rosanne Cash

You made me look like a f_____g lunatic.
—Oliver Stone

ALSO AVAILABLE (an anthology of others’ work): Those Who Forget the Past: The Question of Anti-Semitism

Bi-weekly Spectator columnist at Slate