Articles Written By Robert Birnbaum
Robert Birnbaum is editor-at-large at Identity Theory. All the sketchy details of his life will be (re)fabricated in his memoir-in-progress, Just Talking: How to Do Things With Words. His weblog can be found here.
-
Back in the Day
Dateline: Berlin, 1948
Richard Reeves, who is best known as a presidential biographer having written reliable and useful monographs on John Kennedy, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan (though my favorite of his oeuvre...
-
Rare Medium
The Long Goodbye
By now it is undoubtedly apparent that I am a devotee of literary magazines in general—and specifically the handful that have been kind enough to add me to their...
-
Poetry
Grace and Ease
Of the incontestable reasons to choose one book, one song, one painting over another is the caprice of personal preference. There being many worthy poets available to the loquacious commentator,...
-
Coffee Table Gallery
The Private Frank Gehry
Whether Frank Gehry ranks as one of the greatest living architects or not, he is certainly one of the most famous—think the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao and the Walt...
-
Current Reads
What Does Money Say When It Talks?
When I first became acquainted with Jonathan Dee back in the mid-’90s, he had two decent novels under his belt—A Lover of History, The Liberty Campaign—and he...
-
Back in the Day
The Hunger Historian
Of the infamous quartet of apocalyptic equestrians, Famine seems to be the least studied or, perhaps more accurately, the least visible. Economic historian Cormac Ó Gráda’s Famine: A Short...
-
Current Reads
The New Patriotism—Huh?
The velocity with which books can be—dare I use the verb “written?”—published these days is astonishing. Barely has a disaster decimated an unfortunate number of humans and their...
-
Iconography
The High Life
There was a time when people would joke that they read Playboy for the interviews, eschewing any interest in the centerfolds and other decorative editorial. It should be obvious that...
-
Mi, Mi, Mi, Mi
High Fidelity
As a lifelong Cubanophile I was naturally attracted to expatriate Cuban Norberto Fuentes’s new fiction The Autobiography of Fidel Castro (WW Norton), excellently translated by Anna Kushner. And as...
-
Poetry
John Ashbery Turns 25
John Ashbery is not one of my favorite poets, but his longevity and prodigious accomplishments put him in that newly minted category of the “too big to fail.” Having won...
-
New Finds
Apparition Made Real
Short fiction is on my mind today. Michigan mortician turned writer/poet Thomas Lynch (The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade), whose family business most certainly has allowed him...
-
Current Reads
Full Bloom
One ought not fault Amy Bloom’s admirers for pushing at the limits of sensible praise as one such does in describing Bloom’s new book, Where the God of...