[In "Toward a Radical Middle: Fourteen Pieces of Reporting and Criticism," a] collection of essays written originally for The New Yorker, [Adler] appears in several roles: reporter, critic, social philosopher. As a reporter, she occasionally suffers from too much courtesy: she hates to criticize her hosts, the people who let her run the tape recorder, and her point comes through rather too lightly. As a critic, she bites as hard as anyone, but always in the service of an idea, which saves her from bitchiness or any kind of nastiness high. As a social philosopher, she binds up her several selves and explains what they are all up to.

In her Introduction, which doubles as the best essay in the book, she explains herself in terms of her generation. If Norman Podhoretz did this, she would call it a dubious universalization of self; and sometimes it is. Since...