American politics used to be an amateur sport. But somewhere along the way, we handed over to professionals all the things people used to do for free.
The second volume of Reiner Stach's epic biography of Franz Kafka. . . [is] a tangle of counter-grained and often under-sourced life stories, but reading Stach's magnificent narrative (wonderfully translated by Shelley Frisch) straight through brings death, not life, to the forefront. Stach is a compulsively readable writer. . . . [A]s in the previous volume, the prose in The Years of Insight is supple and very appealingly complex--all of which, once again, is perfectly rendered by Frisch.