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.
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Back in the Day
The Original Trotskyite
While I have every confidence that all manner and mode of ideas and activities now labeled with the ungainly appellation "old school" will not suffer the fate of road apples ...
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Genre Genre Genre
Making Book
It is not uncommon for doctors (Ethan Canin, Daniel Mason), lawyers (Scott Thurow, John Grisham, Barry Reed), and television anchors (Jim Lehrer, Tom Brokaw) to venture into the novel writing...
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Current Reads
War, What Is It Good For?
Ana Menéndez, (Loving Che) a former columnist/reporter for the Miami Herald has written, variously, about Cuba, Kashmir, Afghanistan, Istanbul, and India, her base for three years. With her...
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New Finds
Pants on Fire
Growing up in Chicago in the '50s and '60s, I was not aware of this sprawling prairie city's commitment to racial segregation until Martin Luther King came to...
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New Finds
Nightime, the Right Time?
Ginnah Howard (Rope & Bone) manages to make the harrowing and bitter world of a shattered family (suicide of the father and one brother and the perennial cycle of substance abuse...
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The Coffee Table
Eyes Have It
The Scott Dadich-designed Periodical Photographs (Aperture) by award-winning editorial photographer Dan Winters collects and features 90 full-color images (some of which have appeared in New York, Esquire, Rolling Stone, and the...
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Rare Medium
Hand Me That Rake
If you need a reminder of how degraded, sycophantic, lazy, smug, boring, and predictable contemporary journalism has become, San Francisco State University mentor Peter Richardson's (American Prophet: The Life and...
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Mi, Mi, Mi, Mi
Remembrance of Things Past
The Kennedy crime family seems to have been the first to come up with the bright idea to import its ill-gotten (remember patriarch Joe was, among other things, a bootlegger)...
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Bookbag
The New Morality
Having recently noted Rebecca Solnit's encouraging study of community responses to disasters (like Hurricane Katrina), I also availed myself of an opportunity to chat with Tracy Kidder (Mountains Beyond Mountains),...
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Back in the Day
Everything New Is Old
Since I don't go out much I can't tell if there is a lot of hoopla around the publication of the Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors-edited A New Literary History...
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Back in the Day
Rats in the Cathedral
Given the prodigious and intense scholarship devoted to all manner of subjects--central and tangential--to the Holocaust (or "Shoah" as some Jews prefer to call it), it is an encouraging sign...
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The Coffee Table
New York City Books
As an expatriate Chicagoan trapped in the cosmic psyche experiment of the East Coast, I am loathe to appreciate the ongoing, relentless celebration of New York City as the center...