Joseph Epstein's sixth collection of personal pieces winningly and brilliantly rounds off more than two decades of his writing under the name Aristides for 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."...