Cultural Famine: A Cycle Cultural Famine: A Cycle
Famine is at its worst when people waste away and die. But there is another kind of famine: the death of the human soul--the emptiness and senseless cynicism in this country that h...
Oct 8, 2006 / Books & the Arts / Walter Mosley
Death Trip Death Trip
Philip Roth and Joan Didion have each written compellingly about death, but their insights about dying and mourning signify a retreat from the world rather than an embrace of the f...
Oct 5, 2006 / Books & the Arts / Richard Goldstein
The Missionary Position The Missionary Position
Like radical Islamists and American interventionists, Ayaan Hirsi Ali's The Caged Virgin and Irshad Manji's The Trouble With Islam Today express great concern for Muslim women. But...
Jun 1, 2006 / Books & the Arts / Laila Lalami
Keeping It Real Keeping It Real
In Songs of Experience, Martin Jay examines modern debates over the relationship between theory and the lived world.
May 24, 2006 / Books & the Arts / Jackson Lears
Dead Souls Dead Souls
Juan Rulfo's Pedro Páramo, written during the cultural renaissance that followed the Mexican Revolution, is a marvel of storytelling and testament to the power of the word.
May 18, 2006 / Books & the Arts / Carmen Boullosa
Zones of Disengagement Zones of Disengagement
In Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain, Stefan Collini encapsulates the paradoxes that dominate discussion of the English cultural landscape.
May 11, 2006 / Books & the Arts / Richard Vinen
High Culture, Low Politics High Culture, Low Politics
In The Seduction of Culture in German History, Wolf Lepenies reflects on shifting manifestations of German philosophy and culture and considers the lessons they offer for Europe an...
May 11, 2006 / Books & the Arts / Andreas Huyssen
Love Letters Love Letters
Richard Lingeman's Double Lives explores the richness of friendships between such literary lions as Hawthorne and Melville, Hemingway and Fitzgerald, and Kerourac, Ginsberg and Cas...
May 4, 2006 / Books & the Arts / Ruth Baldwin
On the Corner On the Corner
Times Square may be the most dynamic urban space of the twentieth century, but you wouldn't know it from reading Marshall Berman's On the Town.
May 4, 2006 / Books & the Arts / David Margolick
The Odd Couple The Odd Couple
In Sound and Fury, sportswriter Dave Kindred examines the intersecting lives of Muhammad Ali and Howard Cosell.
Apr 6, 2006 / Books & the Arts / Gene Seymour