ohn Summers’s first collection of essays, Every Fury on Earth (2008), “shows a mastery of the drily ironic style that would stand any social critic in very good stead,” wrote Alan Ryan in the Times Higher Education. Richard Byrne, reviewing the collection in Bookforum, said “Summers writes pieces that traverse multiple disciplines—history, sociology, literature—and bristle with elegant pugnacity. Whether he is blowing the dust off late-nineteenth-century sex scandals or slashing at the parlous state of adjunct labor in the academy, his sentences resound with the clatter and clank of fresh thought coming hard up against the intellectual armor protecting powerful institutions.”

Summers is the editor of The Politics of Truth: Selected Writings of C. Wright Mills (2008), whose biography he is writing for Oxford University Press. “Choosing from the plethora of Mills’s publications is no easy task,” Alan Wolfe wrote in The New Republic. “Summers has handled this chore wisely, rejecting a handy potpourri in favor of concentrating on what Mills had to say about a particular problem: the role intellectuals should play in contemporary society.