Melville at Sea Melville at Sea
In 1851, when the 32-year-old Herman Melville published his masterpiece Moby-Dick, he was already known as a man who'd consorted with cannibals. His first book, Typee: A Peep at P...
May 2, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Brenda Wineapple
A ‘Thirst for the Divine’ A ‘Thirst for the Divine’
Charles Wright and Charles Simic count among the best poets of their generation. Each career has unfolded with considerable excitement for serious readers of contemporary poetry, ...
May 2, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Jay Parini
History in a Blur History in a Blur
It seems scarcely to have required a great philosophical mind to come up with the observation that each of us is the child of our times, but that thought must have been receive...
Apr 25, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Arthur C. Danto
The Days of May The Days of May
What date shall I assign to Chris Marker's magnum opus, A Grin Without a Cat? This rugged oak of an essay-film, whose gnarls trace the growth and withering of decades of leftis...
Apr 25, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Stuart Klawans
Discovery/The Nation ’02 Prizewinners Discovery/The Nation ’02 Prizewinners
The Nation announces the winners of Discovery/ The Nation, the Joan Leiman Jacobson Poetry Prize. Now in its twenty-eighth year, it is an annual contest for poets whose work ha...
Apr 25, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Various Poets
The Torturer’s Apprentice The Torturer’s Apprentice
Alan Dershowitz prides himself on his credentials as a civil libertarian, and to judge by most of the essays in his latest book, Shouting Fire: Civil Liberties in a Turbulent A...
Apr 25, 2002 / Books & the Arts / William F. Schulz
In Cold Type In Cold Type
When I was a teenager on my first trip to Paris, I remember looking out at the Parisians from the window of a taxi as we proceeded along some splendid boulevard and thinking, B...
Apr 25, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Amy Wilentz
What Are They Reading? What Are They Reading?
Pick: THE AMERICAN SOUL: Rediscovering the Wisdom of the Founders.
Apr 18, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Victor Navasky
Ghost Buster Ghost Buster
To immerse oneself in Robert Caro's heroic biographies is to come face to face with a shocking but unavoidable realization: Much of what we think we know about money, power and p...
Apr 18, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Eric Alterman
The Enemy The Enemy
The buildings' wounds are what I can't forget; though nothing could absorb my sense of loss, I stared into their blackness, what was not supposed to be there, billowing of soot...
Apr 18, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Rafael Campo