The Professor of Desire The Professor of Desire
When Philip Roth compiles lists of the writers he most admires, Tolstoy never seems to make it. There's Flaubert, Kafka, Bellow--the touchstones. Gogol, Dostoyevsky, Célin...
May 25, 2001 / Books & the Arts / Keith Gessen
The Uncertainty Principals The Uncertainty Principals
American intellectuals love the higher gossip because it gives intellectual life here--ignored or sneered at by the public--a good name. Sensational anecdotes (Harvard's Louis Aga...
May 25, 2001 / Books & the Arts / Carlin Romano
Blowin’ in His Own Wind Blowin’ in His Own Wind
How the protest singer turned surrealistic prophet.
May 25, 2001 / Books & the Arts / Gene Santoro
The Secret History of Sex The Secret History of Sex
Once in a while you come across a book that is so original, so persuasive, so meticulously researched and documented that it overrides some of your most taken-for-granted assumpti...
May 25, 2001 / Books & the Arts / Barbara Seaman
Conservatism as Phoenix Conservatism as Phoenix
You want to find out why politics has become so dreary? You won't find the answer in Rick Perlstein's book. But what you will find is relief. I've read Before the Storm twice and ...
May 25, 2001 / Books & the Arts / Robert Sherrill
Beauty and Sadness Beauty and Sadness
A tidal wave is coming. Soon I am sure. It will sweep all of us away. --The opening lines of Eureka One of the more familiar works of Japane...
May 17, 2001 / Books & the Arts / John Anderson
Sub-Urban Planning Sub-Urban Planning
Chicago's Robert Taylor Homes--once the nation's largest public housing project--is currently being dismantled. Half of its buildings have already been torn down, and of those tha...
May 17, 2001 / Books & the Arts / Adele Oltman
Re-education on Henry Adams Re-education on Henry Adams
Henry Adams liked to say that his pedigree and eighteenth-century upbringing had hobbled him in the races of the twentieth century. The scion of not just one but two Presidents of...
May 17, 2001 / Books & the Arts / Michele Pridmore-Brown
‘The Sound of Surprise’ ‘The Sound of Surprise’
Bright and eager, bouncy and buoyant, sharp-eyed and quick-eared and passionately in love--those are a few of the ways you could describe Calle 54, director Fernando Trueba's trib...
May 17, 2001 / Books & the Arts / Gene Santoro
Suffer the Children Suffer the Children
In 1995 the brutal slaying of Elisa Izquierdo by her crack-addicted mother seized headlines. Responding to the public's outrage that city officials had ignored obvious signs that ...
May 10, 2001 / Books & the Arts / Daphne Eviatar