Charlotte’s Web Charlotte’s Web
In 1890 the American feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote a remarkable short story, "The Yellow Wallpaper," about a woman--genteel, educated, with more than a casual taste f...
Jul 17, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Vivian Gornick
Written in Memory Written in Memory
Helen Keller may be the world's most famous supercrip.
Jul 17, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Michael Bérubé
Lady Day Lady Day
Justice Sandra Day O'Connor's new book, The Majesty of the Law, appears at a particularly auspicious moment. As the swing vote on and author of Grutter v.
Jul 17, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Herman Schwartz
The Bourgeois Revolutionary The Bourgeois Revolutionary
Publishers, even academic presses, know that the public likes biography and cater to this taste with a stream of handsomely produced, and often quite well-written, volumes.
Jul 17, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Robin Blackburn
Miles Davis Miles Davis
Most of what we know about the life of Miles Davis is either anecdotal or a matter of official record, and thus not absolutely reliable; but by all accounts, most pertinently h...
Jul 2, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Lucius Shepard
The Girls of Summer The Girls of Summer
This Independence Day, the symbolic struggle being waged on thousands of screens across the Empire pits Reese Witherspoon against Arnold Schwarzenegger, gooey-sweet girl agains...
Jul 2, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Stuart Klawans
The Road Map to Nowhere The Road Map to Nowhere
Although the laboriously negotiated and long-delayed Middle East "road map" received a diplomatic boost by the recent intervention of George W. Bush, the plan is replet...
Jul 2, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Roane Carey
A Costly Friendship A Costly Friendship
Much of the talk in Europe these days--in newspaper offices, at dinner parties, in foreign ministries--is about how the United States and Britain were conned into going to war ...
Jul 2, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Patrick Seale
Woody Guthrie Woody Guthrie
When Bob Dylan took the stage at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, all leather and Ray-Bans and Beatle boots, and declared emphatically and (heaven forbid) electrically that he w...
Jul 2, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Steve Earle
Walt Whitman Walt Whitman
In 1848, 29-year-old Walt Whitman was for three months a reporter for the Daily Crescent in New Orleans, writing fluff pieces about local color and charm as seen through Yankee...
Jul 2, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Richard Gambino