Books and Ideas

Top Gun Top Gun

Of the making of many books about Abraham Lincoln there is no end.

May 27, 2004 / Books & the Arts / James M. McPherson

Wild at Heart Wild at Heart

In 1947 Saul Bellow published a novel called The Victim in which a derelict character named Kirby Allbee haunts another named Asa Leventhal, claiming that Leventhal is responsibl...

May 27, 2004 / Books & the Arts / Vivian Gornick

The African Predicament The African Predicament

Howard French has written a passionate, heartbreaking and ultimately heartbroken book about covering West Africa's blood-soaked descent into a nightmare of war and greed as a rep...

May 27, 2004 / Books & the Arts / Deborah Scroggins

Where the Wild Things Are Where the Wild Things Are

There's a temptation to begin with death. The dark title of A.S. Byatt's Little Black Book of Stories suggests it; the phrase is also a riposte to D.H.

May 27, 2004 / Books & the Arts / Maria Margaronis

Diversity and Its Discontents Diversity and Its Discontents

For most of his half-century-long career, Samuel Huntington, professor of government at Harvard, has made a point of telling the US ruling elite what it has most wanted to hear.

May 27, 2004 / Books & the Arts / Daniel Lazare

Truly, Madly, Deeply Truly, Madly, Deeply

It's only a little fughetta in C minor, a piece J.S. Bach wrote into a notebook he was keeping for the purpose of teaching his eldest son.

May 27, 2004 / Books & the Arts / Paul Griffiths

The Maharani of Muck The Maharani of Muck

Perched elegantly on an exotic throw pillow in her seaside Bombay apartment, the Arabian Sea breeze gently ruffling her long black hair, Shobhaa De looks like one of the seductre...

May 27, 2004 / Books & the Arts / Miranda Kennedy

The Metaphysical Couple The Metaphysical Couple

This book has a past, which begins at least in 1995, when Elzbieta Ettinger brought out a controversial account of the unpublished correspondence between Hannah Arendt and Martin...

May 20, 2004 / Books & the Arts / Carol Brightman

The North Korean Conundrum The North Korean Conundrum

In the prevailing American stereotype, North Korea is a failing Stalinist dictatorship held together only by the ruthless repression of a mad ruler who dreams of firing nuclear w...

May 20, 2004 / Books & the Arts / Selig S. Harrison

Robert Silvers

The Rebirth of the NYRB The Rebirth of the NYRB

The highbrow literary magazine has re-emerged as a combative political actor.

May 20, 2004 / Feature / Scott Sherman

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