There is an open question on what character flaw or personality disorder causes me to lord over people who don’t know anything about Nicaragua or at least where it is located. No doubt it will be given ample consideration in my memoir (current working title: Just Talking: How to
This time around—it being an election year and all—a hurricane’s landfall stole the G.O.P.’s most recent thunder. This time, the threat of another deadly disaster got through to our lame-duck president and the major networks. And obviously New Orleans and the Gulf Coast
Growing up in the shining city on the plains—Chicago—early on in my life I encountered the dark and shocking story of Leopold and Loeb’s crime: In 1924 two University of Chicago students, Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold, Jr., killed, with no apparent motive, 14-year-old Bobby
In fits of attempting constructive self-criticism (also known as navel-gazing), I ponder the possibility that my disaffection with mainstream politics and my lifelong drift from left-leaning liberal to socialist to anarchist is mostly a result of my biography. That probably is supposed to matter, especially to people
[Photo by Robert Birnbaum] I was a reader of Robert Stone (A Hall of Mirrors, Dog Soldiers, A Flag for Sunrise, Children of Light, as well as assorted entries in Harper’s—one on Havana and one on the 1988 Republican National Convention in New Orleans) before I knew anything
Though I dipped into Louis De Bernières’s Colombian Trilogy (The War of Don Emmanuel’s Nether Parts, The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman, Señor Vivo and the Coca Lord) it was not until Captain Corelli’s Mandolin (the basis for an awful film by the same name) and a
You all know, or will learn now, that I admired Kurt Vonnegut a great deal—an admiration that began and lasted past my youthful, stupid years into my golden, stupid years. I was looking for some information about Kurt and stumbled upon a note from his daughter, Edie. Res ipsa
Receiving an advance copy of The Best American Mystery Stories 2008—guest-edited this year by George Pelecanos—reminds me that Houghton Mifflin’s onslaught of its franchise The Best American Series anthologies is not far behind. What started in 1915 as simply The Best American Short Stories now has
The ubiquity of digital cameras and the avalanche of images whose lives are wholly lived on hard drives, as well as other aspects of 21st-century visual aesthetics, make black-and-white photography seem like some arcane ritual practiced in far-off time by god-artists named Walker Evans, Henri
I suppose one might be amazed at the subjects that fill the hundreds of thousands of books published each year—and though I don’t want to sound jaded, I must say that I am no longer. Though, of course, many books give me pause for a lingering inspection of
