Books
421 results
Page 37
Albert Camus at 100
The rebel, the moralist, and the man
Albert Camus, once read on every college campus in America, is now remembered vaguely if at all. Yet his voice is timelessly relevant, and so is his compelling cry for decency and morality in an unforgiving universe.
Articles
5 minute read
Henry Bushkin's 'Johnny Carson'
His master’s voice
Like so many celebrities, Johnny Carson, the beloved king of late-night TV, was a public success and a personal failure. What does that tell us about his enabler, who is currently spilling the beans about his former client?
Articles
5 minute read
Margaret MacMillan’s ‘Dangerous Games'
What historians (and politicians) don't know
The past shapes the present in ways we ignore at our peril. It’s even more dangerous to misread it, though, as Margaret MacMillan points out in her new book. But many would-be historians are tempted by folly and ambition to try.
Articles
5 minute read
Austenmania: Moral fables for modern times
Beneath the cleavage: Jane Austen’s closet feminists
Why are 21st-century Americans attracted to narratives featuring heroines whose economic survival depends upon snaring a wealthy husband? Perhaps because they refuse to be passive victims.
Articles
3 minute read
Robert Weintraub’s ‘The Victory Season’
Baseball, then and now
Robert Weintraub’s The Victory Season looks back to America’s first postwar baseball year, 1946, when the Red Sox and Cardinals faced each other, as this year, in an entertaining World Series. The differences in the game—and in ourselves—are palpable, though.
Articles
7 minute read
Julian Rushton’s ‘Mozart’
The astonishing truth about Mozart
Mozart was a genius, but he was hardly the womanizer and spendthrift of popular mythology. His immense musical talent aside, Mozart was a pretty ordinary guy.
Articles
4 minute read
Ben Urwand’s ‘The Collaboration’
Hitler and Hollywood: Six degrees of separation
I’ve just finished reading a remarkable book— and all sorts of links started coming into my mind. It's the story of Hollywood’s obscene collaboration with Germany in the 1930s— one in a chain of collaborations from the Armenian genocide to the Holocaust.
Articles
5 minute read
Tony Auth, survivor
One political cartoon is worth….
In his 40 years at the Philadelphia Inquirer, Tony Auth convinced me that the maturing of the editorial cartoon in America is a sine qua non if we’re ever to mature as a civilized society.
Articles
1 minute read
Richard Burgin’s ‘Hide Island’
A vision of civilized savagery
In Richard Burgin's dark, dystopic vision, human society is mostly an arrangement for predators to seek their prey, and vice versa.
Articles
6 minute read
Jonathan Franzen’s ‘The Kraus Project’
Why was Karl Kraus so angry? Well, you’d angry too if….uh….
Karl Kraus, the Austrian playwright, editor and social critic, was little known to today’s English-speaking audience— until now. Thanks to the novelist and Kraus scholar Jonathan Franzen, the angry old man of German satire lives anew.
Articles
3 minute read