Books and Ideas

Charlotte’s Web Charlotte’s Web

In 1890 the American feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote a remarkable short story, "The Yellow Wallpaper," about a woman--genteel, educated, with more than a casual taste f...

Jul 17, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Vivian Gornick

Written in Memory Written in Memory

Helen Keller may be the world's most famous supercrip.

Jul 17, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Michael Bérubé

The Bourgeois Revolutionary The Bourgeois Revolutionary

Publishers, even academic presses, know that the public likes biography and cater to this taste with a stream of handsomely produced, and often quite well-written, volumes.

Jul 17, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Robin Blackburn

The Road Map to Nowhere The Road Map to Nowhere

Although the laboriously negotiated and long-delayed Middle East "road map" received a diplomatic boost by the recent intervention of George W. Bush, the plan is replet...

Jul 2, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Roane Carey

A Costly Friendship A Costly Friendship

Much of the talk in Europe these days--in newspaper offices, at dinner parties, in foreign ministries--is about how the United States and Britain were conned into going to war ...

Jul 2, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Patrick Seale

Walt Whitman Walt Whitman

In 1848, 29-year-old Walt Whitman was for three months a reporter for the Daily Crescent in New Orleans, writing fluff pieces about local color and charm as seen through Yankee...

Jul 2, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Richard Gambino

American Rebels American Rebels

Introduction

Jul 2, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Jack Newfield

Immortality Immortality

There are killer weeds, deep in the flower patch, down at the bottom of the tombstone. Only they'll seem to breed out of the ground itself.

Jun 26, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Robert Mazzocco

Our Man in Jazz Our Man in Jazz

Not many people can say they changed the world and make it stick. In Myself Among Others: A Life in Music, George Wein does.

Jun 26, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Gene Santoro

White Teeth White Teeth

Norman Rush's first novel, Mating (1991), opens with a nervous but gripping epigram: "In Africa, you want more, I think." The speaker, an unnamed American anthropologist who do...

Jun 26, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Michael Wood

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