Joseph Epstein's sixth collection of personal pieces winningly and brilliantly rounds off his twenty-three-year tenure as editor of The American Scholar. "The trick with these essays," he recently wrote, "is to take what seems a small or mildly amusing subject and open it up, allow it to exfoliate, so that by the end something arises that might be larger and more intricate than anyone -- including the author -- had expected." Among the things that arise here are naps, Gershwin, aging, name-dropping, long books, pet peeves, talent vs. genius, Anglophilia, and surgery -- the head and the heart.