Speak Again, Memory
Greg Grandin : Non-Fiction
Readers of Fidel Castro's My Life will find explanations of the Cuban Revolution, but no apologies for its suppression of dissent.
-
-
The Last Angry Man
Jeff Kisseloff : History
Eliot Asinof, blacklisted author of Eight Men Out, created a lifetime of work celebrating rebels and victims of injustice.
-
Seeing Past the Gorgons
Barry Schwabsky : Fine Art
The New Yorker's art critic turns his eye toward the cultural summits.
-
Fathers and Sons
Joseph H. Cooper : South Africa
A teacher discovers that sixty years after its publication, Alan Paton's Cry, the Beloved Country still stirs deep emotions about fathers and errant sons.
-
The Light Stuff
Melanie Rehak : The Short of It
The Kindle e-reader lightens your load, but can you curl up with it in bed?
-
Victim 'Hood
Chris Lehmann : The Short of It
An account of the most recent installment in the nation's sick love affair with literary exhibitionists.
-
Final Fantasy
David Waldstreicher : History
Susan Faludi's Terror Dream made a provocative splash, but therapy is no substitute for understanding reality.
-
Eulogy for an Independent Bookstore
Jessica Teich
No chain stores or web sites can replace Dutton's in the hearts of the LA literati.
-
The Film We Dreamed
Charles Taylor : Film
In Zeroville, Steve Erickson explores New Hollywood's promise and doom and the dissolution of cinema into spectacle.
2007
-
The Political Doris Lessing
Dan Kellum : Public Figures & Intellectuals
The winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature is every bit as political as her predecessors.
2006
-
Pamuk's Prize
If Nobel Prize-winning novelist Orhan Pamuk is a political writer, it is by virtue of his sympathy for what is old and faded, for what no longer matters, or what never did.
-
Short Takes
Fatin Abbas & Christine Smallwood : China
Reviews of Half of a Yellow Sun, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves and The City Is a Rising Tide.
-
Sloppy Seconds
Stuart Klawans : Publishing Industry
The plagiarism flap over Opal Mehta is essentially a story about clichés and stereotypes passing from one subliterary commercial product to another.
-
Behind Enemy Lines
Raffi Khatchadourian : Osama bin Laden
New scholarship sheds light on Osama bin Laden's rhetoric, charisma and complex religious and political vision.
-
John Yoo's Tortured Logic
Stephen Holmes : Law & Justice
The Berkeley law professor's carte blanche constitutionalism was a gift to the Bush Administration, offering legalistic justifications for lawless behavior.
-
The World According to Karen Finley
Performance artist Karen Finley answers questions about politics, satire and her new book, a fantasy affair between George W. Bush and Martha Stewart.
2005
-
The Tower of Babel
Jerome Charyn's Savage Shorthand: The Life and Death of Isaac Babel examines the life the revolutionary idealist murdered by Stalin in 1940 and explodes the literary myths that have thus far defined his works.
-
I Wonder As I Wander
Michael Gorra : Cultural Criticism & Analysis
Rebecca Solnit's A Field Guide to Getting Lost plumbs the mysteries of losing oneself and finding oneself in the realm of the utter unknown.
-
The Uncertainty Principle
By writing a novel about a conventional novelist writing about a conventional man, J.M. Coetzee's latest work illuminates the role of the novel and cuts through typical and tired theories on fiction.
-
It's a Man's, Man's World
Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men seems designed as a calculated assault on the reader.
-
The Unexamined Life
Lee Siegel : Autobiography & Memoir
Sean Wilsey's new memoir is a vulnerable, aching, unresolved account of growing up rich amid San Francisco's high society.
-
Mother Nature's Son
Novalis's unfinished novel is a kaleidoscope of visions and allegories of nature.
2004
2002
-
What Are They Reading?
Arthur C. Danto : What They're Reading
A fresh look at one of Shakespeare's best comedies.
This week: A look at the advocacy group MoveOn.org at 10. Plus: Controversy in Africa over the indictment of the Sudanese President; Amy Alexander and Chris Rabb on the challenges facing minority journalists in their transition to the web; and The Nation's new sex column. (13mb mp3)
Get the best of The Nation on your Blackberry or Smartphone: mobile.thenation.com
