Books and Ideas

How Now, Iron Johns? How Now, Iron Johns?

In Growing Up Absurd, his classic polemic on shortchanged youth, Paul Goodman remarks, parenthetically, that "the problems I want to discuss in this book belong primarily, in our...

Nov 25, 1999 / Books & the Arts / Ellen Willis

Curtain Call With Terkel Curtain Call With Terkel

Charles Kuralt, who got around a lot himself but wore out faster, once remarked: "When Studs Terkel listens, everybody talks." Not so many years ago, in fact, we asked Kuralt to ...

Nov 25, 1999 / Books & the Arts / John Leonard

Exploiting a Tragedy, or Le Rouge en Noir Exploiting a Tragedy, or Le Rouge en Noir

The author of this review is the son of a zek: My father barely survived his deportation to a Siberian camp in Vorkuta.

Nov 25, 1999 / Books & the Arts / Daniel Singer

‘Our’ Gide? ‘Our’ Gide?

Whenever Gide wrote or spoke about himself directly, which was not infrequently, he would insist that his wars within were to be traced to his very genes.

Nov 25, 1999 / Books & the Arts / Patrick Smith

There You Go Again… There You Go Again…

Our correspondent, longtime Los Angeles Times reporter and columnist Robert Scheer, has spent several hours over the years questioning President Reagan on a variety of subjec

Nov 25, 1999 / Books & the Arts / Robert Scheer

1999 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize 1999 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize

The Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize of $10,000, awarded annually for the most outstanding book of poems published in the United States by an American, is administered mutually by th...

Nov 18, 1999 / Books & the Arts / Marilyn Hacker

A Son’s Own Story A Son’s Own Story

If you are looking for a piece of new evidence that will finally vindicate or convict Alger Hiss with certainty, you won't find it in Tony Hiss's poignant father-son memoir, A Vi...

Nov 4, 1999 / Books & the Arts / Jack Gelber

The ‘Right’ Books and Big Ideas The ‘Right’ Books and Big Ideas

Abigail Thernstrom, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and her husband, Harvard professor Stephan Thernstrom, would like to thank the John M.

Nov 4, 1999 / Feature / Eric Alterman

A Dialectical Humanism A Dialectical Humanism

To my distress and perhaps to my delight, I order things in accordance with my passions.... I put in my pictures everything I like.

Nov 4, 1999 / Books & the Arts / Andy Merrifield

Mr. Debs, My Darling Mr. Debs, My Darling

In offhand, birdsong passing, Marguerite Young observes: "As for the nineteenth century, it may be said that it was probably the leakiest century there ever was and so would rema...

Oct 28, 1999 / Books & the Arts / John Leonard

x