Panegyric for the Plane Tree Fallen on Fifth Avenue Panegyric for the Plane Tree Fallen on Fifth Avenue
At the end of Eighty-eighth, across from the museum and as west as east will take you to the park from Gracie Mansion. Before the lightning brought it down,
Dec 9, 2004 / Books & the Arts / Stanley Plumly
Is That All There Is? Is That All There Is?
It's hard to resist the misery of V.S. Naipaul's late fiction, hard not to surrender to its bleak and wary authority.
Dec 9, 2004 / Books & the Arts / Michael Wood
Subcontinental Homesick Blues Subcontinental Homesick Blues
Nearly twenty years ago, in a village in the western Indian state of Rajasthan, a young woman called Roop Kanwar was burned to death at her husband's funeral pyre.
Dec 9, 2004 / Books & the Arts / Siddhartha Deb
What Are They Reading? What Are They Reading?
I've never had a strong appetite for travel literature.
Dec 7, 2004 / Books & the Arts / Stacy Torres
Godard’s Inferno Godard’s Inferno
Michelangelo and Ulysses came home from the war with knapsacks bulging, bearing the reward for hardships suffered and inflicted. "We promised you the world," the soldiers boasted...
Dec 2, 2004 / Books & the Arts / Stuart Klawans
False Promises False Promises
In American Dream, his masterful new book about welfare reform, Jason DeParle brings together two groups of people who rarely seem to meet: welfare policy-makers and welfare reci...
Dec 2, 2004 / Books & the Arts / Jennifer Egan
Body Heat Body Heat
After the Kinsey Report but before the first Penthouse Forum, John Updike wrote, "He kneels in a kind of sickness between her spread legs.
Dec 2, 2004 / Books & the Arts / Mark Lotto
The War That Never Was The War That Never Was
As war threatened Europe in the 1930s, a physicist turned to a psychiatrist to help understand the impending violence.
Dec 2, 2004 / Books & the Arts / Russell Jacoby
The Invisible Hand Holds the Remote The Invisible Hand Holds the Remote
What does it mean that a whopping 70 percent of Americans, according to a recent New York Times-CBS News poll, believe that mass culture is responsible for debasing our moral val...
Nov 30, 2004 / Books & the Arts / Robert Scheer