Books and Ideas

Who Will Tell the People? Who Will Tell the People?

Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers is Daniel Ellsberg's story of his personal journey from being in the early 1960s a "dedicated cold warrior" who supported A...

Dec 5, 2002 / Books & the Arts / David Rudenstine

Rawls and Us Rawls and Us

The late John Rawls was, by all accounts, a remarkably modest and generous person, much beloved by his friends and students, and profoundly uninterested in the kinds of fame an...

Dec 5, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Eric Alterman

‘Obscure as That Heaven of the Jews’ ‘Obscure as That Heaven of the Jews’

In the rabbi's parable a lame one climbs
Onto a blind one's shoulders and together
They take the fruit of the garden of the Lord.

Nov 26, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Robert Pinsky

Wheeling My Father Through the Alzheimer’s Ward Wheeling My Father Through the Alzheimer’s Ward

Here where everyone forgets everything,
including where they are
or what they are fighting to remember,

Nov 26, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Edward Hirsch

The New Apartheid The New Apartheid

Ashwin Desai's "We Are the Poors" is one of the best books yet on globalization and resistance.

Nov 26, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Naomi Klein

The Call of the Junco Bird The Call of the Junco Bird

An English woman I've never met
calls to read me her new poem
about the little Texas junco bird
whose cry sounded to the early settlers

Nov 26, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Edward Hirsch

Rethinking the Movement Rethinking the Movement

As any casual observer of mega-bookstore shelves knows, the history of the modern civil rights movement is a well-studied field.

Nov 26, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Eric Arnesen

The Humanitarian Temptation The Humanitarian Temptation

In 2000, United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan posed a question to the Millennium Summit of the UN: "If humanitarian intervention is, indeed, an unacceptable assault on s...

Nov 21, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Ian Williams

My Guitar Gently Weeps My Guitar Gently Weeps

"I was in a highly unshaved and tatty state," John Lennon said of his 1966 meeting with a certain conceptual artist, then mounting her first show at London's Indica Gallery.

Nov 21, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Alex Abramovich

A Sex of One’s Own A Sex of One’s Own

Nature versus nurture was always too simple a formulation. Now, we ask: Is it chance, choice, family, culture, hormones or genes that determine who we are and whom we love?

Nov 14, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Julia M. Klein

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