Books & the Arts

We’re All Ears We’re All Ears

What sticks in my mind more than any particular accomplishment of the supersecret National Security Agency is its mammoth size. Only a few miles from my home, I now know, exists a...

May 31, 2001 / Books & the Arts / Dusko Doder

The Battle of Algiers The Battle of Algiers

A new memoir stirs long-suppressed memories of the “war without a name.”

May 31, 2001 / Books & the Arts / Adam Shatz

The Gift Outright The Gift Outright

Readers of this magazine do not need reminders of the costs of the cold war. The mountains of corpses, the damaged lives, divided families and displaced refugees, the secret poli...

May 25, 2001 / Books & the Arts / Casey Nelson Blake

Prole Like Me Prole Like Me

About every thirty years for the last one hundred, a crusading journalist somewhere has gotten the same idea: Abandon the middle-class literary life (for a brief period), get a re...

May 25, 2001 / Books & the Arts / Steve Early

Wollstonecraft to Lady Di Wollstonecraft to Lady Di

Here we go, starting on what promises to be a pleasantly engrossing tour of the landmarks of three centuries of Anglo-American intellectual feminism, guided by a seriously impressi...

May 25, 2001 / Books & the Arts / Deirdre English

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 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

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