On Shooting at Elephants On Shooting at Elephants
They laughed when I sat down with these two writers--and never mind that both books arrived in the same box. The bad gay boy and the cold war saint! The apostle of derangement an...
Nov 27, 2000 / Books & the Arts / John Leonard
Liberalism: In Search Of Liberalism: In Search Of
A half-century after the appearance of The Vital Center, Arthur Schlesinger Jr.'s spirited political polemic, we have more than sufficient cause to meditate on what might be called...
Nov 27, 2000 / Books & the Arts / Paul Buhle
After the Renaissance After the Renaissance
A quarter-million people thronged Abraham Lincoln's Memorial that day. In the sweltering August humidity, executive secretary Roy Wilkins gravely announced that Dr. William Edwar...
Nov 27, 2000 / Books & the Arts / Kevin Brown
Clipping the Yankee Clipper Clipping the Yankee Clipper
The twentieth century produced few American heroes like Joe DiMaggio. He was arguably the best all-around ballplayer who'd ever taken the field, a unique combination of power, sp...
Nov 27, 2000 / Books & the Arts / Peter Schrag
The Martian Chronicles The Martian Chronicles
Long before Carrie-Anne Moss rips open Val Kilmer's shirt and begins pounding his chest, providing him with a version of CPR that she must have learned from a Japanese drum troup...
Nov 16, 2000 / Books & the Arts / Stuart Klawans
Remembering Ring Remembering Ring
The quiet grace of Ring Lardner Jr., who died the other week at 85, seemed at odds with these noisy, thumping times. I cannot imagine Ring playing Oprah or composing one of those...
Nov 16, 2000 / Books & the Arts / Roger Kahn
The ‘Ism’ That Won the Century The ‘Ism’ That Won the Century
To buy or not to buy turns out to have been the question of the century in America--Just Do It or Just Say No. And in the past fifteen years, consumer society has moved to the ce...
Nov 16, 2000 / Books & the Arts / Lawrence B. Glickman
Romancing the Screen Romancing the Screen
VINCENT CANBY As a memorial tribute to Vincent Canby, the "Arts & Leisure" section of the New York Times recently published half a page of excerpts of his prose, as se...
Nov 10, 2000 / Books & the Arts / Stuart Klawans
Mr. Sammler’s Planet Mr. Sammler’s Planet
What ought to be read--and why--are questions that have a unique urgency in a multicultural milieu, where each group fights, legitimately, for its own space and voice. In the pas...
Nov 10, 2000 / Books & the Arts / Ilan Stavans
Coronation by Cornet Coronation by Cornet
LOUIS ARMSTRONG AT 100 In 1927 a young cornetist led his band into a meticulously hilarious version of a classic composition Jelly Roll Morton had made famous, "Twelfth St...
Nov 10, 2000 / Books & the Arts / Gene Santoro