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The enormous black hole in the book is the Grand Puppetmaster himself, Dick Cheney, the man who was prime minister to Bush’s figurehead president. In Decision Points, as in the Bush years, he is nearly always hiding in an undisclosed location.
New York City is built on the backs of earnest, reticent, frugal, and ambitious Midwesterners. These are “the settlers” who make up the “Third New York” immortalized in E.B. White’s Here Is New York. Look in the right places and they seem to be everywhere: Minnesotans ordering the cheapest beers on draft at East Village bars, dumpster-diving South Dakotans, Iowans doctoring up ramen with cheap vegetables sold on Chinatown sidewalks. The Third New Yorker, White writes, “accounts for New York’s high-strung disposition, its poetical deportment, its dedication to the arts, and its incomparable
In a 1999 London Review of Books essay, the Scottish novelist Andrew O’Hagan recalled stopping one night at the window of the Ferragamo store on Fifth Avenue. On display were a pair of stilettos once owned by Marilyn Monroe, “scarlet satin, encrusted with matching rhinestones,” which put O’Hagan in mind of ruby slippers. After a decade, or perhaps much longer, of contemplating Marilyn, it seems O’Hagan has finally got her—and her little dog, too.
The girl in the photograph wears her black hair tucked behind her ears. Her part is slightly crooked, and there is a small mole low on her throat, right above the top button of her blouse. She might be anywhere between five and ten years old. She’s been posed against a wall or a screen. Stripped of its context, this is a lovely but unremarkable portrait of a small, serious looking girl, an image that's easy to look at and easy to forget.
But let’s restore the context and look again. Pol Pot liked to have his prisoners photographed. Like the fourteen thousand or so others imprisoned at Tuol
For the declaration that he is the greatest living short-story writer in English to have become a cliché, William Trevor must be doing something right.
After a cover-to-cover reading of this Anglo-Irishman's second doorstop collection, "Selected Stories," what lingers is less lone memorable tales than a feeling—or rather intervals of feelings that build into an emotional chord. Sorrow is the dominant note, blending with regret, wistfulness, loss, longing and an indefinable sweetness that makes the whole downer package much easier to take. Sorrow is a pleasure in Trevor world—richer, deeper
Alice Neel enjoyed the greatest second act in the history of American art. Her paintings of New York bohemian life earned high praise, especially from leftist critics, during the Great Depression, but she fell into near-total obscurity with the rise of abstract expressionism after World War II.
When I first heard of this book, earlier this year, I felt a mix of fascination and dread. Listing every appearance of punk rockers on film seemed laughably masochistic, for both reader and writer. That a friend was one of the editors (Zack Carlson and I have intersected in the punk underground world for a dozen years) made the venture a potential lose-lose for me, leaving either disappointment or jealousy. And how could two editors actually pull off such a grandiose project? And even if they did, how could they convince the reading public that their labor-intensive thesis—presenting an entire
Writing with relevance about George Washington is a strange trick. It’s not just that the terrain has been so thoroughly covered, although there is that (as of this writing, Amazon sells 13,172 books with the words George Washington in the title). It is the unique challenge of writing about a jewel of American exceptionalism who was himself genuinely exceptional. There’s the gifted military feinting, the repeated rejection of dictatorship, the young man who treated food and sleep as optional. There are those suspicious intercessions of "providence:" all those horses shot out from under him,
“Never liked girls or knew many, except my sisters, but our queer plays and experiences may prove interesting, though I doubt it,” Louisa May Alcott confided to her journal in 1868, while writing Little Women. Deemed more than “interesting,” the semiautobiographical novel became a classic in Alcott’s lifetime and remains so today. Each year some thirty-five thousand fans descend on Orchard House—the place in Concord, Massachusetts, where Alcott wrote and set her bestseller—looking to imagine the lives of the March girls, as well as that of their creator. Suffice it to say that Alcott has never
Since humanity emerged from nomadism, the cultivation of food has been a key component of our culture. It’s a reflection of wealth, an indication of mechanical prowess, and an instrument of war. And as historian Nick Cullather reminds us, food was also the basis for some of the most charged encounters of the cold war, as played out in the developing political and market systems of Asia. In The Hungry World, he argues that such efforts amounted to a technocratic seduction of the Asian peasantry—a wide-scale effort of social and technological engineering intended to showcase the fruits of the
If all thinkers are either foxes or hedgehogs, then Kierkegaard was decidedly a hedgehog. By his own emphatic acknowledgment, everything he wrote had a single purpose: to arouse a certain state of mind, or soul, in each of his readers. He called this state of mind “the consciousness of sin.” What he meant by that is something like what Saint Augustine and Martin Luther meant, but not exactly. In the difference lie his originality and his importance for us.
The Present Age was written in 1846 and is newly reissued with a midcentury introduction by existentialist philosopher Walter Kaufmann.
Seattle is among the unlikelier American cities to be settling its accounts of racial strife. After all, the home of grunge, Starbucks, and the Space Needle prides itself on a certain shaggy, do-it-yourself civic sensibility. It’s the town of Frasier, Bill Gates, and Jimi Hendrix, not Bull Connor, Orval Faubus, or Martin Luther King Jr. Still, as journalist Doug Merlino makes clear in The Hustle, the overcast capital has plenty of its own unresolved racial legacies—and like virtually all major American cities, these come refracted through patterns of class segregation, Chamber of Commerce–sanctioned