Books & the Arts

Capitalist Realism Capitalist Realism

We're sorry, but we do not have permission to present this article on our website. It is an excerpt from Upside Down: A Primer for the Looking-Glass World (Metropolitan). © 20...

Nov 27, 2000 / Books & the Arts / Eduardo Galeano

Coming of Age in Venezuela Coming of Age in Venezuela

A few years back, critics of postmodernism, both left and right, chuckled at the academic sting pulled on the journal Social Text when it published Alan Sokal's bogus article on ...

Nov 27, 2000 / Books & the Arts / Greg Grandin

Riding the Third Wave Riding the Third Wave

I have been waiting for Manifesta to come out. I had certain hopes for this book. In particular, I was looking forward to using it as a corrective addition in a course I'm teachi...

Nov 27, 2000 / Books & the Arts / Michelle Jensen

On Shooting at Elephants On Shooting at Elephants

They laughed when I sat down with these two writers--and never mind that both books arrived in the same box. The bad gay boy and the cold war saint! The apostle of derangement an...

Nov 27, 2000 / Books & the Arts / John Leonard

Clipping the Yankee Clipper Clipping the Yankee Clipper

The twentieth century produced few American heroes like Joe DiMaggio. He was arguably the best all-around ballplayer who'd ever taken the field, a unique combination of power, sp...

Nov 27, 2000 / Books & the Arts / Peter Schrag

What Is What Was? What Is What Was?

In the Acknowledgments section of his biography of Saul Bellow, James Atlas quotes a somewhat greater biographer, Samuel Johnson: "We know how few can portray a living acquaintan...

Nov 27, 2000 / Books & the Arts / Richard Stern

The ‘Ism’ That Won the Century The ‘Ism’ That Won the Century

To buy or not to buy turns out to have been the question of the century in America--Just Do It or Just Say No. And in the past fifteen years, consumer society has moved to the ce...

Nov 16, 2000 / Books & the Arts / Lawrence B. Glickman

Remembering Ring Remembering Ring

The quiet grace of Ring Lardner Jr., who died the other week at 85, seemed at odds with these noisy, thumping times. I cannot imagine Ring playing Oprah or composing one of those...

Nov 16, 2000 / Books & the Arts / Roger Kahn

The Martian Chronicles The Martian Chronicles

Long before Carrie-Anne Moss rips open Val Kilmer's shirt and begins pounding his chest, providing him with a version of CPR that she must have learned from a Japanese drum troup...

Nov 16, 2000 / Books & the Arts / Stuart Klawans

Coronation by Cornet Coronation by Cornet

LOUIS ARMSTRONG AT 100 In 1927 a young cornetist led his band into a meticulously hilarious version of a classic composition Jelly Roll Morton had made famous, "Twelfth St...

Nov 10, 2000 / Books & the Arts / Gene Santoro

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