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19

WEDNESDAY

Is Hal Holbrook the patron saint of today’s nonfiction? Since the Eisenhower administration, the actor has been donning a white suit and mounting the stage to deliver monologues in the persona of Mark Twain—which is longer, as a recent letter-writer to the New York Times pointed out, than Samuel Langhorne Clemens spent doing the same. What works on the boards works on the bookshelves, too. Witness the flood lately of writers reanimating illustrious bygone writers: Christopher Hitchens’ Why Orwell Matters, Terry Teachout’s The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken, Norman Mailer’s new tome about the writing of Norman Mailer. Now comes Stanley Crouch, teamed with critic Playthell Benjamin, bearing Reconsidering the Souls of Black Folk: Thoughts on the Groundbreaking Classic Work of W.E.B. DuBois. Why try to write the seminal book on race in America when you can write about the seminal book on race in America instead? Crouch is here at 7 p.m. at Politics and Prose, 5015 Connecticut Ave. NW. Free. (202) 364-1919. (Tom Scocca)