Books and Ideas

A Partisan’s Review A Partisan’s Review

In A Partisan View, one of the many memoirs in which score-settling refugees from the glory days of the anti-Stalinist, pro-Modernist quarterly bite each other on their kneecap...

Mar 4, 1999 / Books & the Arts / John Leonard

Kazan and the Bad Times Kazan and the Bad Times

Dalton Trumbo, a militant blacklisted screenwriter and novelist, commenting on the fifties struggle against government attempts to throttle the American left, said that in that b...

Mar 4, 1999 / Books & the Arts / Arthur Miller

Albright’s State Deportment Albright’s State Deportment

Flirtatious and ferocious at the same time, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright stamps the world stage over Kosovo, threatening fire from heaven if Serbian strongman Slobodan ...

Feb 25, 1999 / Books & the Arts / Ian Williams

Remember the Alamo, Part II Remember the Alamo, Part II

On the fourth of August last year in San Antonio, the Alamo rumbled.

Feb 25, 1999 / Books & the Arts / Bárbara Renaud González

Spice Grrrl Spice Grrrl

On a trip to Russia in 1995 I was told by the young writers I met there that when a certain famed Soviet novelist returned to his native land, he was an offensive anachronism to th...

Feb 25, 1999 / Books & the Arts / Eileen Myles

Oscar Who? Oscar Who?

Although the producers of the Academy Awards ceremony like to boast that a billion people watch their broadcast, I take comfort in knowing that another 5 billion do not.

Feb 25, 1999 / Books & the Arts / Stuart Klawans

After Alienation After Alienation

Since the collapse of the Berlin wall and the Soviet Union, many on the left seem to have swallowed the idea that there is no alternative to capitalism.

Feb 24, 1999 / Books & the Arts / Daniel Singer

The Prophet Vulgarized The Prophet Vulgarized

Trotsky is both the hero of the Russian Revolution--the mastermind of October, the founder of the Red Army--and also its Job, hounded across a "planet without a visa," his family...

Feb 24, 1999 / Books & the Arts / Daniel Singer

So, Is It Back to Bowling Alone? So, Is It Back to Bowling Alone?

The scene with which The Good Citizen opens could have been lifted straight from a Norman Rockwell painting.

Feb 18, 1999 / Books & the Arts / David Kirp

What Boddah You?: The Authenticity Debate What Boddah You?: The Authenticity Debate

If there's one thing everyone agrees on about Hawaii writer Lois-Ann Yamanaka, it's that she has a perfect ear for local pidgin dialects, which change cadence and idiom througho...

Feb 11, 1999 / Books & the Arts / Mindy Pennybacker

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