The Oceanic Feeling The Oceanic Feeling
John Banville's latest novel, The Sea, winner of the Man Booker Prize, is a painstaking narrative of memory, grief and many losses, remarkable for what it richly conveys about what...
Dec 15, 2005 / Books & the Arts / Claire Messud
Middlemarch Middlemarch
The GOP is an object of popular loathing, yet prospects seem dim for ousting it from power. Three new books explain why: Off Center explores the GOP's genius for subverting the mec...
Dec 15, 2005 / Books & the Arts / Eyal Press
Gene McCarthy Gene McCarthy
Eugene McCarthy was a pure original, a great and good man, whose fundamental historical achievement was to be the standard-bearer for a moral and philosophical campaign against the...
Dec 15, 2005 / Books & the Arts / George McGovern
Fear and Laughing in Las Vegas Fear and Laughing in Las Vegas
Lenny Bruce was a lone voice at a time when irreverent comedy could land him in jail on obscenity charges. But the spirit of Lenny Bruce hovered over the first annual Comedy Festiv...
Dec 15, 2005 / Books & the Arts / Paul Krassner
The Faith of Eugene McCarthy The Faith of Eugene McCarthy
Eugene McCarthy, the Minnesota senator, frequent presidential candidate and poet who died Saturday at age 89, never had a chance at the Democratic nomination in 1968. But his passi...
Dec 13, 2005 / Books & the Arts / Robert Sherrill
Remembering Eugene McCarthy Remembering Eugene McCarthy
Eugene McCarthy's political life was full of contradictions: A conventional cold war liberal and fierce anti-Communist, in the Vietnam era, he was transformed into the standard-bea...
Dec 12, 2005 / Books & the Arts / Jon Wiener
The Outsider The Outsider
Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker movement, died 25 years ago this month. Today Catholic Workers are in Cuba, keeping vigil outside the US Naval Prison at Guantanamo Bay ...
Dec 10, 2005 / Books & the Arts / Colman McCarthy
Harold Pinter: Art, Truth and Politics Harold Pinter: Art, Truth and Politics
The pursuit of truth in drama is elusive, but in life it is mandatory, wrote Harold Pinter, who died Wednesday at 78. When he won the 2005 Nobel Prize for literature, he condemned ...
Dec 8, 2005 / Books & the Arts / The Nation
Imitation of Art Imitation of Art
The Chronicles of Narnia is the perfect combination of Christian allegory and The Lord of the Rings, a well-crafted commodity and nothing more. The Ice Harvest, an anti-Christmas f...
Dec 8, 2005 / Books & the Arts / Stuart Klawans
The Look of Truth The Look of Truth
Photographs are supposed to be unbiased recognitions of reality, but they're really self-portraits of the photographer. The Ongoing Movement, a blend of biography and analysis, exa...
Dec 8, 2005 / Books & the Arts / Peter Plagens