Pulitzer-winning Brown University history mentor emeritus (The Radicalism of the American Revolution, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787) Gordon Wood has a lucid and elucidating take on history’s popularizers—like David McCullough, Walter Isaackson, Jon Meacheam, Stephen Ambrose—pointing out that it is not quality of
Recently one of our esteemed senators (his name escapes me), in talking about our world-leading incarceration rate, offered that having so many people in jail might suggest that Americans are so terrible that we need to lock up so many. There are other explanations, of course, but they are
The unlikely course of historian/activist (or vice versa), Howard Zinn’s subversive (I take that to be a good thing) A People’s History of the United States—first published in 1981 to selling over a million copies and spawning a historiographic cottage industry (there now being a number
Speaking of the incomparable Gore Vidal, his newest book Gore Vidal: Snapshots in History's Glare (Abrams Books) is, if you treasure this sort of thing (which I do), an amazing memoir (more than 500 images) rendered with a variety of artifacts--photographs, letters, manuscripts--from his archives and
Let's face it, the Jews have long been a troublesome people for the rest of the planet. Of course, that topic or virtually anything to do with Jews is a minefield of issues especially since the Jews control the media and the banks and a speck of dust
New York City may be the American megalopolis hated by outlanders and flyover-zone residents (in part because apparently that's where that unfortunate rubric originated), but L.A. seems to draw more negative commentary. Artists like Jack Kerouac and Alejandro Jodorowsky have called it "the loneliest city
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 (which is to dry up and become dust in the wind), I do fear that, for example, the
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 of America (Harvard University Press) --although I do take exception to a use of "
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 that new information or new ways of looking at what we know are still being unearthed.
Former Boston Globe and Pulitzer Prize-winning scribe Fred Kaplan (who also writes for Slate) can be forgiven for the hyperbolic claim of the subtitle in 1959: The Year Everything Changed (Wiley), as there are at least two other books that pretty much claim the same thing--and, after all,
