The death of the great caricaturist David Levine reminded me of another great artist, political cartoonist Herb Block (better known as Herblock). Herblock, whose career spanned 70 years and four Pulitzer Prizes, began at the Chicago Daily News and then moved on to the Washington Post (he was also syndicated
Our man in Boston talks to Michael Ondaatje about why he writes novels, how he measures satisfaction, and when fiction can succeed by operating like poetry.
No doubt my fondness for the geography of my youth (Chicago and neighboring Big 10 states) has contributed to my sensitivity to regional chauvinism—who coined the phrase “flyover zone” anyway? Anyway, that fondness extends to the bountiful literature that pours out of that region from the pens of Kent
If he never published another book, music commentator and cultural historian David Hadju most certainly made his bones with Lush Life, his incomparable biography of the great Duke Ellington collaborator, Billy Strayhorn. Of course he has continued to publish valuable books—Positively 4th Street, The Ten-Cent Plague, and now
Visitors to this (so to speak) space are aware of my fondness for periodical literature and “small” magazines in particular. One I pay attention to is Glimmertrain, a literary quarterly out of Oregon published by two sweet sisters, Linda and Susan. Most of these magazines are similar in content, being
Jim Harrison’s screenplays and almost 30 books, including 15 of fiction (in his own reckoning, he is first and foremost a poet, and also a wonderful food commentator) have firmly fixed him as a shining star in the literary constellation—though I am hard put to understand how he
The Washington Post’s Jonathan Yardley is a useful and valuable commentator on books and culture, whose good work stands out in an increasingly degraded enterprise (the reviewing of books in some few hundred words for newspapers). Since February 2003, he has been devoting an occasional column to, as he
Last summer I had occasion to comment on caricaturist David Levine’s most recent tome collecting his assorted drawings of American presidents. Sadly, Levine succumbed to prostate cancer over the holidays. Bruce Weber’s precise obituary hit some of the high points for those ignorant of the hand behind the
Given, as they say, the objective conditions besetting our country (need I list them?), it would not be unreasonable to consider whether the United States (of Embarrassment, to quote Eminem) is yet functional, or perhaps to look for a time when it did work. A remarkable new panoramic study, When
As long as I am levitating in the mid-last century, I should note that Alfred Hitchcock’s groundbreaking film Psycho, released in 1960, is the subject of David Thomson’s latest book, The Moment of Psycho: How Alfred Hitchock Taught America to Love Murder (Basic Books). Thomson, who is
