From Gorbachev to Putin
Robert V. Daniels : Russia
Five authors provide differing views of the post-glasnost era and of the failed promise of democratic reform in Russia.
Books, Literature, & Ideas
Subsections:
2008
-
-
No Exit
Daniel Lazare : Non-Fiction
Laurence Tribe's new book asks us to consider the "invisible" web of ideas that have grown around the text of the Constitution. But who's to say what it contains?
-
Spectacular Wrongs
Samuel Moyn : Non-Fiction
A new history celebrates the nineteenth-century roots of humanitarian intervention and glosses over their imperial pretensions.
-
Inconvenient Truths
Steven Epstein : Non-Fiction
Elizabeth Pisani and Jonny Steinberg explore antipodal aspects of the fight against AIDS.
-
An Inky, Well-Paneled Place
D.D. Guttenplan
Comic books, once the source of cultural panic, have achieved a dominant hold on the public imagination.
-
Poll Position
Alexander Provan : Political Analysis
Pollster John Zogby's new book illuminates the changing nature of American values and lives.
-
The Plot Against Grimes
David Schiff : Music
A recent production of Benjamin Britten's Peter Grimes is a grim masterpiece of opera noir.
-
In the Presence of Darwish
Sinan Antoon
A tribute to the premier Arab poet of the past half-century.
-
Orthogonian Visions
Thomas J. Sugrue : History
Historian Rick Perlstein explores the resentment and polarization sparked by the Nixon era's cultural and political strife.
-
Solzhenitsyn's Life and Our Times
Katrina vanden Heuvel : Russia
Despite the controversies he aroused in the West and in Russia, Solzhenitsyn remains above all else a writer who bore witness to Soviet society's long-censored suffering.
-
Strong Medicine
Melissa Holbrook Pierson : China
An epic portrait of the Tiananmen Square protests, Ma Jian's Beijing Coma is one hell of a powerful novel.
-
Fathers and Sons
Matt Steinglass : China
Three recent books trace the generational fault lines of the Confucian family during China's past and present revolutions.
-
Back Talk: Raj Patel
Christine Smallwood : Environment
Writer and activist Raj Patel explains why shopping better won't solve the food crisis.
-
The James Gang
Brenda Wineapple : Biography
In Henry James and his family, biographers find a fascinating story of dynastic melodrama.
-
Bright Oblivion
Emily Wilson
A new translation of Sophocles' Ajax derives chilling power from its infidelity to the original text.
2007
-
Little Disturbances, Enormous Changes
Remembering Grace Paley and the impact she had on literature, activism and many generations of women and children.
-
God Bless You, Mr. Vonnegut
John Leonard : Public Figures & Intellectuals
Kurt Vonnegut, who passed away Wednesday, will be remembered for his brilliant, cynical and often depressing humor.
2006
-
Naguib Mahfouz: An Appreciation
Egypt has been deprived of its greatest living writer, and the world has lost one of its most humane literary figures.
-
The Strange Silence of Günter Grass
By concealing for a near-lifetime that he had served in the Waffen SS, literary giant Günter Grass treated himself with an indulgence he did not hesitate to deem a moral defect in others. And for that, we are all losers.
-
Sorel's People
In Literary Lives, caricaturist Edward Sorel tells all and then some about giants like Yeats, Proust, Hellman and Jung within the humble frame of a comic strip.
-
Beckett at 100
No playwright has given plainer witness to the planet's most violent century or borne such loving witness to the dispossessed.
-
Remember 'The Jungle'!
As Upton Sinclair's novel turns 100, it reminds us that the best way to nurture pride in America is to see its underbelly--and tell the truth about it.
2005
-
The Twilight Zone
Though Bergelson wrote in Germany during the 1920s, his stories in Shadows of Berlin are more focused on the past apocalypse than the impending one.
RSS