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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The Osage Rose
Tom Holm, Native American scholar at the University of Arizona, fashions his debut novel in post-Great War Oklahoma, where oil exploration and exploitation were seriously at play. Ex-cop J.D....
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One Minute to Midnight
In Churchillian terms, this was Kennedy’s finest moment. By most accounts, his handling of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis was a judicious and even-handed bit of brinksmanship. Of course it...
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The Temple of the Wild Geese & Bamboo Dolls of Echizen
Tsutomu Mizukami, who died in 2004, was a prolific writer who produced all manner of books—novels, detective stories, biographies, and plays. The Temple of Wild Geese is partly autobiographical; like...
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Small Lives
Pierre Michon’s Small Lives was first published in French in 1984, and is now being republished by Archiplelago Books, a small press out of Brooklyn that specializes in “publishing excellent...
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The Pathseeker
For some years Melville House has published the Art of the Novella series, which is now supplanted by the Contemporary Art of the Novella series, of which Nobel laureate Imre...
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10 Bad Dates with De Niro
This odd compendium of lists ends its 450 pages with Graham Fuller’s “Ten Christmas Movies to Save Us from Satan’s Power” (Fuller apologizes for leaving off Terry Zweigoff’s...
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The History of Human Rights
On the face of it, human rights is not exactly the most exciting topic, but in this historical survey (apparently the only comprehensive study of its kind), Micheline Ishay has...
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America Between the Wars From 11/9 to 9/11
This book’s subtitle (“The Misunderstood Years Between the Fall of the Berlin Wall and the Start of the War on Terror”) aptly synopsizes its content, focusing on the 12 years...
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Democracy’s Prisoner
The Eugene V. Debs story is a moving, albeit instructive one, though he likely will never be given his due as one of the great figures of American history. Jailed...
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Beyond the Hoax
Physicist Alan Sokal is famous for his 1996 Social Text article, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” written as a parody of postmodernism (it is included in...
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The Comanche Empire
There is some quibbling regarding the use of the word “empire” in Pekka Hämäläinen’s fascinating new history of the powerful and unrecognized Comanche tribe of the...
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Stop Me If You’ve Heard This
Jim Holt, who writes for a number of smart publications—The New York Times, The New Yorker, Slate, Lingua Franca, and then some—tries to answer the question, “What’s...