There was a point at which I experienced great vexation that the steady drumbeat of eyewitness reportage contained by the books of Jon Lee Anderson, George Packer, Thomas Ricks, and Seymour Hersh seemed to have little or no effect on the body politic. Along comes Bob “Which Way is the
You don’t need me to make you aware of such new books as those by Cormac McCarthy, Philip Roth, or Margaret Atwood—the literary press (such as it is) and even the barbarians manning the decks of mass media seem to find the press releases apprising them of these
Historian Sean Wilentz talks about social studies versus history, purple prose in founding-father biographies, and how "states rights" started trumping slavery in Jefferson Davis's memoirs.
Based on the drumbeat of enthusiastic notices it seems that the book of the moment is critic/scholar Daniel Mendelsohn’s The Lost. Good news indeed (I will have something to add to the choir in due time), as this is a wonderful non-Holocaust, Holocaust book (read the reviews
President Bush’s press conference of Sept. 15 should be noted as a landmark of sorts, as he continued to use the presidential bully pulpit to elevate public discourse and educate the American people in what appears to be the New Logic: Question: Bush: Interesting slight of hand, no? To
Publishers Weekly and The New York Times must have been too busy to note that Dandy Dan Wickett, founder of the Emerging Writers Network and the hardest working man in the book world (leading some observers to think there is more than one DD) and Steve Gillis, author and founder
Journalism being what it is—it seems driven by lists and so-called service features and other banalities—there have been occasions when I have been tempted to stoop to such, and on this day I can no longer resist. I hope against all hope that this assemblage makes some
Reporting a civil war in Africa sounds tough, but try investigating a 40-year-old crime in America's quietest suburb. A chat with journalist Sebastian Junger about his new book on the Boston Strangler.
No tawdry headlines, scandals, feuds, vicious reviews, or dumb awards—what a pleasant week! I took pause to contemplate the late Susan Sontag’s view that, “To have access to literature, world literature, was to escape the prison of national vanity, of philistinism, of compulsory provincialism, of inane schooling, of
I didn’t previously have a particular picture of a perfect or at least prototypical New England day—yesterday in Peterborough, N.H., at the MacDowell Colony will ever onward be that picture. Bright sun, but not too—colors vivid and true. Breezy, almost cloudless sky, and a congenial gathering—
