Books and Ideas

The Forgotten Oscar The Forgotten Oscar

In the run-up to Sunday's Oscar ceremony the focus was on Elia Kazan and whether the Motion Picture Academy was doing the right thing by honoring him with a Lifetime Achievement ...

Mar 18, 1999 / Books & the Arts / Victor Navasky

Shud He Have Been a Contendah? Shud He Have Been a Contendah?

The inevitable controversy--presenting name-naming film director Elia Kazan with a Lifetime Achievement Award--has unfolded like an accident waiting to happen, aggravating the A...

Mar 18, 1999 / Books & the Arts / Cliff Rothman

Montale as Couplet Montale as Couplet

The publication of Jonathan Galassi's translation and meticulous annotation of Eugenio Montale's Collected Poems, 1920-1954 has been justifiably celebrated on both sides of the ...

Mar 11, 1999 / Books & the Arts / Michael Mewshaw

Feminine Mystiquers Feminine Mystiquers

For Danielle Crittenden, the "click" came when she was going to play tennis with her husband and a couple of acquaintances. She left her racket on one side of the court.

Mar 11, 1999 / Books & the Arts / Kim Phillips-Fein

Soul Survivor of Auschwitz Soul Survivor of Auschwitz

During a wide-ranging conversation I had with Primo Levi in his home in Turin in the summer of 1985, two years before his death, I asked him what effect Auschwitz had on him as a...

Mar 4, 1999 / Books & the Arts / Gabriel Motola

A Partisan’s Review A Partisan’s Review

In A Partisan View, one of the many memoirs in which score-settling refugees from the glory days of the anti-Stalinist, pro-Modernist quarterly bite each other on their kneecap...

Mar 4, 1999 / Books & the Arts / John Leonard

Kazan and the Bad Times Kazan and the Bad Times

Dalton Trumbo, a militant blacklisted screenwriter and novelist, commenting on the fifties struggle against government attempts to throttle the American left, said that in that b...

Mar 4, 1999 / Books & the Arts / Arthur Miller

Albright’s State Deportment Albright’s State Deportment

Flirtatious and ferocious at the same time, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright stamps the world stage over Kosovo, threatening fire from heaven if Serbian strongman Slobodan ...

Feb 25, 1999 / Books & the Arts / Ian Williams

Remember the Alamo, Part II Remember the Alamo, Part II

On the fourth of August last year in San Antonio, the Alamo rumbled.

Feb 25, 1999 / Books & the Arts / Bárbara Renaud González

Spice Grrrl Spice Grrrl

On a trip to Russia in 1995 I was told by the young writers I met there that when a certain famed Soviet novelist returned to his native land, he was an offensive anachronism to th...

Feb 25, 1999 / Books & the Arts / Eileen Myles

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