Books and Ideas

Visible Man Visible Man

The Jack Johnson story is about many things, but none more emphatically than the meaning of manhood to the Anglo-Saxon imagination at the turn of the century.

Feb 10, 2005 / Books & the Arts / Greg Tate

Show Me the Money! Show Me the Money!

Toward the end of the undervalued 1979 movie adaptation of former pro football receiver Peter Gent's undervalued 1973 novel, North Dallas Forty, a beat, bent lineman, played by t...

Feb 10, 2005 / Books & the Arts / Gene Seymour

Misunderstanding Iran Misunderstanding Iran

A threatening storm gathers in the Middle East.

Feb 10, 2005 / Books & the Arts / Reza Aslan

Grand Illusion Grand Illusion

André Malraux incarnated a certain ideal of "the French intellectual." A writer of international renown, he distinguished himself as a man of action before going on to bec...

Feb 10, 2005 / Books & the Arts / Stefan Collini

A Buddha for the Blue States A Buddha for the Blue States

Scholars of the New Testament speculate that the Gospel of Mark was the first of the canonical Gospels to be composed, sometime between 68 and 73 CE, or thirty-five to forty year...

Feb 3, 2005 / Books & the Arts / Donald S. Lopez Jr.

In Cold Blood In Cold Blood

Daphne Eviatar has written on Africa for the New York Times Magazine and the Boston Globe, among other publications. She last wrote for The Nation on Angola.

Feb 3, 2005 / Books & the Arts / Daphne Eviatar

Uneasy Rider Uneasy Rider

It's not often that a new style appears in American prose, but this is what happened with John Haskell's first book, a collection of short stories called I am not Jackson Pollock...

Feb 3, 2005 / Books & the Arts / Benjamin Kunkel

Our Godless Constitution Our Godless Constitution

The faith of our Founding Fathers definitely wasn't Christianity.

Feb 3, 2005 / Books & the Arts / Brooke Allen

Cartoon Wars Cartoon Wars

Once upon a time, a psychiatrist named Fredric Wertham went on a tear over Wonder Woman.

Feb 3, 2005 / Books & the Arts / Richard Goldstein

The Moviegoer The Moviegoer

If Herbert Marcuse and Senator Joseph McCarthy had gone to a movie together in the late 1950s--and that could only happen in a movie--they would have walked out, probably not tog...

Jan 27, 2005 / Books & the Arts / Lee Siegel

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