Books & the Arts

Death and Glory Death and Glory

The premature deaths in the past year of Warren Zevon, Johnny Cash and Joe Strummer ought to be enough to make the most pious among us angry at The Man Upstairs.

Oct 2, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Eric Alterman

Ancestors Ancestors

They are bicycling into the sun. He has a dhoti on under his coat and a briefcase with LYRIC marked in big letters.

Sep 25, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Meena Alexander

French Connections French Connections

The setting is a one-room schoolhouse, which is momentarily unoccupied except for a pair of turtles.

Sep 25, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Stuart Klawans

Savage Modernism Savage Modernism

A refugee from Nazism and a distinguished New York psychoanalyst, Sandor Rado had thought long and deeply about Hitler's takeover of Germany. Years ago, the writer Otto Friedri...

Sep 25, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Russell Jacoby

The Gray Zone The Gray Zone

On a hot, dusty summer day in 1998, I drove with friends from Smolensk to the village of Zagor'e to meet Ivan Tvardovsky, a survivor of Stalin's forced-labor camps and the brot...

Sep 25, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Lynne Viola

A Kinder, Gentler Fundamentalism A Kinder, Gentler Fundamentalism

In his 1998 book, One Nation, After All, Alan Wolfe chided liberals for their misapprehensions about the political attitudes of ordinary Americans.

Sep 18, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Michael Massing

Shooting Wars Shooting Wars

In her new book, Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag's focus is upon theaters of war and the way in which photographers have interpreted their role in the production of ...

Sep 18, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Peter Wollen

She’s Gotta Have It She’s Gotta Have It

In his 1997 song "Highlands," Bob Dylan reports a conversation between himself and a waitress. "She says, You don't read women authors, do you?/...

Sep 18, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Claire Dederer

Access Memory Access Memory

The threshold between one and zero Blurs-- Blurs-- a drift of charge filters through--

Sep 17, 2003 / Books & the Arts / James McCorkle

Tokyo Story Tokyo Story

A Love Affair for the postcollege, flirting-with-Buddhism set, Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation is a travelogue of the emotions, concerned with the deepening relationship be...

Sep 11, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Stuart Klawans

x