Profane Illuminations Profane Illuminations
New biographies of Rousseau and Voltaire help us appreciate how very fragile the eighteenth century's great movement of ideas was, and how remarkable it is that the Enlightenment n...
Nov 17, 2005 / Books & the Arts / David A. Bell
Don’t Criticize Me Don’t Criticize Me
Karl Rove and his Singing Slimemeisters riff You Go To My Head.
Nov 17, 2005 / Books & the Arts / Calvin Trillin
Emile Capouya Emile Capouya
Emile Capouya, literary editor of The Nation from 1970-1976, was both a working man and an intellectual, who brought trade book publishing to European standards and lived to oppose...
Nov 17, 2005 / Editorial / Ted Solotaroff
President Thelma President Thelma
Is Commander-in-Chief softening up the country for President Hillary? Americans may not not be ready to put a woman in the White House, but they may have calmed down enough to cont...
Nov 17, 2005 / Books & the Arts / Richard Goldstein
In Kars and Frankfurt In Kars and Frankfurt
The winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize for Literature wrote this 2005 editorial in The Nation, addressing the issue of the artistic imagination at risk in a repressive state.
Nov 17, 2005 / Books & the Arts / Orhan Pamuk
Agee’s Gospel Agee’s Gospel
Two new volumes in the Library of America series present the life and work of James Agee, whose flashes of greatness as an essayist, screenwriter, novelist and Nation film reviewe...
Nov 17, 2005 / Books & the Arts / Phillip Lopate
Soul on Ice Soul on Ice
Is jazz really dead--or has it simply moved to a cooler location? Four new books take a scholarly look at a musical genre that is on the wane in America, but finding new life and n...
Nov 17, 2005 / Books & the Arts / David Yaffe
The Scrivener and the Whale The Scrivener and the Whale
Andrew Delbanco's new biography of Herman Melville reveals that the great writer came to realize that what torments men is not the longing to believe that there is meaning in the u...
Nov 17, 2005 / Books & the Arts / Vivian Gornick
I Act, Therefore I Am I Act, Therefore I Am
Admired from a distance and reviled up close, Laurence Olivier could establish a relation with his audience that was like an infection. His official biography chronicles a personal...
Nov 17, 2005 / Books & the Arts / David Thomson
Monster’s Ball Monster’s Ball
Party in the Blitz, the final volume of Nobel laureate Elias Canetti's memoirs, is a chaotic, horribly fascinating memoir of a man who was a slave to love, an omnivorous intellect ...
Nov 17, 2005 / Books & the Arts / John Banville