The Scourge of Baltimore The Scourge of Baltimore
As truth-tellers, journalists remain the undocumented aliens of the knowledge industry, operating in an off-the-books epistemological economy apart from philosophers and scient...
Nov 7, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Carlin Romano
A Bombmaker of Conscience A Bombmaker of Conscience
We are all fascinated by the lives of the powerful and famous, and in the last part of the twentieth century Andrei Sakharov became one of Russia's most famous. He burst onto the ...
Jun 13, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Dusko Doder
The Great Societizer The Great Societizer
Reading Robert Caro to learn about Lyndon Johnson is like going to an elaborate buffet in order to get the four basic food groups; they both give you what you need along with much...
May 2, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Philip A. Klinkner
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
Publishers Caught in a Web Publishers Caught in a Web
Jason Epstein's Book Business: Publishing Past Present and Future is the third memoir of a major American life in book publishing to reach print in less than two years. It is at ...
Jan 26, 2001 / Books & the Arts / Gayle Feldman
The Führer Furor The Führer Furor
Chaplinesque Rapscallion New Leader of Germany's National Socialist Party --The Onion "I have nothing to say about Hitler." With this...
Jan 5, 2001 / Books & the Arts / Paul Reitter
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
What Is What Was? What Is What Was?
In the Acknowledgments section of his biography of Saul Bellow, James Atlas quotes a somewhat greater biographer, Samuel Johnson: "We know how few can portray a living acquaintan...
Nov 27, 2000 / Books & the Arts / Richard Stern
Another ‘October Surprise’ Another ‘October Surprise’
Poor Anthony Summers--he writes a 600-page book on Nixon based on massive and exhaustive research, including interviews with a thousand people and 120 pages of documentation--and...
Oct 19, 2000 / Books & the Arts / Jon Wiener