Books and Ideas

Starting Out in the ’50s Starting Out in the ’50s

The best memoirs of recent years reveal "The Way We Live Now" as well as or better than most contemporary fiction.

Oct 23, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Dan Wakefield

How the Other Half Learns How the Other Half Learns

Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom have long been pillars of highbrow conservatism in America.

Oct 23, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Peter Schrag

Man’s Best Friend Man’s Best Friend

As Stevie Smith once wrote, while impersonating God, "I will forgive you everything,/But what you have done to my Dogs/I will not forgive." About Dan Rhodes's novel Timoleon Vi...

Oct 16, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Caleb Crain

Being and Nothingness Being and Nothingness

John Coetzee's new book reads like a suicide note.

Oct 16, 2003 / Books & the Arts / John Banville

The One-State Solution The One-State Solution

Is Zionism a failed ideology? This question will strike many people as absurd on its face.

Oct 16, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Daniel Lazare

Two Poems by Marianne Moore Two Poems by Marianne Moore

Eight of Marianne Moore's major poems were published in The Nation in the 1940s and '50s, including "The Mind Is an Enchanting Thing," "In Distrust of Merits" and "A Carriage F...

Oct 9, 2003 / Books & the Arts / The Nation

La Japonaise La Japonaise

With each last reverberation from the world of 1960s and '70s radicalism--the recent parole of Kathy Boudin, for example, a member of the Weather Underground who served twenty-...

Oct 9, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Jennifer Egan

The Man Without Qualities The Man Without Qualities

The hero of The Namesake is an American of Bengali parentage named Gogol Ganguli.

Oct 9, 2003 / Books & the Arts / David Bromwich

Local Color Local Color

A review of Fortress of Solitude, by Jonathan Lethem.

Oct 9, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Melanie Rehak

Our Victorian Ancestors Our Victorian Ancestors

"You are the heirs of one of the country's great traditions, the Progressive movement that started late in the nineteenth century and remade the American experience piece by pi...

Oct 2, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Michael Kazin

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