Search results for ""ivan r dee, inc""

Baltimore is the setting for (and typifies) one of the most penetrating examinations of bigotry and residential segregation ever published in the United States. Antero Pietila shows how continued discrimination practices toward African Americans and Jews have shaped the cities in which we now live. Eugenics, racial thinking, and white supremacist attitudes influenced even the federal government's actions toward housing in the 20th century, dooming American cities to ghettoization. This all-American tale is told through the prism of Baltimore, from its early suburbanization in the 1880s to the consequences of "white flight" after World War II, and into the first decade of the twenty-first century. The events are real, and so are the heroes and villains. Mr. Pietila's engrossing story is an eye-opening journey into city blocks and neighborhoods, shady practices, and ruthless promoters.

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The return of migrant birds from their wintering grounds in the tropics is one of the delights of America's spring, as anyone will testify whose heart has leapt in April or May at the first liquid song of the woodthrush, or the first black-and-orange flash of the Baltimore oriole. But in recent years concern has grown that migrant birds may be declining, perhaps because of deforestation at their winter quarters in the Caribbean and in Central and South America. Now comes the first evidence that such declines are indeed happening to migrant birds. They pour into the Northern Hemisphere each year in a multi-colored, singing cascade: cuckoos, swallows, martins, swifts, turtle doves, warblers, wagtails, wheatears, chats, nightingales, nightjars, thrushes, pipits, and flycatchers. The vanishing of these Old World birds would be not just an environmental loss but a cultural disaster of enormous magnitude, as many of these species have resonated through literature, legends, and folklore for thousands of years. The turtle dove's arrival is announced in the Bible's Song of Solomon; the nightingale sings from Latin poetry to John Keats to a 1940s hit in London's Berkeley Square; the European cuckoo, with its double note that is a perfect musical interval-a minor third-is the source of proverbs in every country of the continent. In Say Goodbye to the Cuckoo, Michael McCarthy highlights for the first time the disappearance of these birds which, he points out, are a part of Europe's distinctive cultural furniture, "as much as cathedrals, Latin, olive oil, or wine." He shows how their loss would do devastating damage to the cultural inheritance of us all. With 13 woodcuts.

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With health reform enacted by the Congress and signed by the President, the subject matter of The Treatment Trap is a compelling component in the national debate. Taking advantage of Rosemary Gibson's knowledge gleaned from extended experience in the field of medical care and Janardan Singh's similar knowledge but from a financial perspective, the authors explore the most neglected issue in American medicine today: the overuse of medical care, including needless surgery and other invasive procedures, out-of-control x-ray imaging, profligate testing, and other wasteful practices that have become routine among too many American doctors. Their combined reporting and analysis concentrates on the human aspects of this disturbing trend in health care, with personal experiences that reflect poorly on hospitals as well as physicians. They show how money spent for questionable and even useless care is diverting major funds that could be better used to treat patients who are genuinely sick and sometimes cannot afford the extravagant charges of the American health-care system. Their suggestions for reforming the delivery of health care, and their cautions to individual consumers about how to deal with situations they may encounter, make The Treatment Trap essential reading for medical care consumers, health-care professionals, and policymakers alike.

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In the twentieth century, African Americans not only helped make popular music the soundtrack of the American experience, they advanced American music as one of the preeminent shapers of the world's popular culture. Vast numbers of black American musicians deserve credit for this remarkable turn of events, but a few stand out as true giants. David Stricklin's superb new biography explores the life of one of them, Louis Armstrong. The life story of this great instrumentalist, bandleader, and entertainer illustrates much of the black entertainer's impact on American culture and illuminates how popular culture often intersects with politics and economics. Armstrong emerged from a precarious background and triumphed over almost impossible odds, becoming a transcendent public figure and an international icon. Mr. Stricklin concentrates on Armstrong's musical talent, something many observers called a thing of genius. But he also pays special attention to Armstrong's identity a black man in America and the ways in which he triumphed over the mistreatment and disrespect dealt countless people like him. The creativity and exuberance he shared with the world came from his unique vantage as an artist and as an African American with a striking and lively spirit of freedom. He might have been able to demonstrate that determination in any line of work, but his story has special urgency because he expressed his creative power through music. With 16 black-and-white photographs.

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In between his romances with baseball, in early 1969 Bill Veeck took up the challenge of managing Boston's semi–moribund Suffolk Downs racetrack. "Being of sound mind and in reasonable possession of my faculties," Veeck wrote, "I marshaled my forces, at the tender age of fifty–four, and marched upon the city of Boston, Massachusetts, like a latter–day Ben Franklin, to seek my fame and fortune as the operator of a racetrack. Two years later, fortune having taken one look at my weathered features and shaken its hoary locks, I retreated, smiling gamely." When he took over the track, Veeck had yet to learn that the normal daily output of some sixteen hundred horses (including straw) would amount to so much, or be so hard to dispose of. But that was the least of his problems. In the tough–minded and Tabasco–tongued prose that is his trademark, Veeck recalls the battles he won and lost, the fun he had, and what he discovered about horse racing at "Sufferin' Downs." It's a zesty, complicated story but a relentlessly fascinating one about the inside workings of one of the most popular sports in America.

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After an initial honeymoon with historians, in recent years John F. Kennedy has been more carefully scrutinized, resulting in a wide variety of assessments of his presidency and his life. Michael O'Brien, who knows as much about Kennedy as any historian now writing, has distilled the findings of his heavily detailed biography of a few years ago into a compact life that touches on all the important issues and incorporates the findings and judgments of major works since the president's death. He offers nuanced interpretations of the influence of Kennedy's parents, his early life, his struggles with health problems, his intellectual development, his heroism in World War II, his House and Senate career, and the paramount moments of his presidency, including the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and his stand on civil rights, tax policy, and other domestic matters.

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In his second collection of poems, Adam Kirsch examines the world we live in now, a world in which the dangers of history have invaded the pleasures of private life. His connected poems use traditional forms to create a free, contemporary music amidst the omens of the post-September 11 world. Mr. Kirsch is at home with all the strange juxtapositions of our culture: he can celebrate "the paradisal sighs" of Jane Birkin and still hear the "angelic harmonies" of Handel's Messiah; he can observe military jets trailing "stripes of smoke" and find the quiet of a synagogue in Queens. Invasions is a moving and highly personal collection, Mr. Kirsch's exploration of what he calls, with fear and hope, "the magically real."

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Carl Rollyson's Biography: A User's Guide is an informative and entertaining text for those interested in biography. No aspect of the genre, from A to Z, goes uncovered: issues around authorized and unauthorized biography, censorship, libel, fair use, public domain (referred to as "PD" by publishers and editors), and a great deal more-including examples drawn from published biographies, as well as general and specific assessments of the biographer's art. Mr. Rollyson demonstrates that biography has more dimensions than are generally gleaned from book reviews and academic discourse. In a lively and provocative style, he argues with other biographers and critics, avoiding the polite and vague tones of many reference books on the subject.

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The proliferation of dating websites, printed personals and self-help relationship books reflect the new ways Americans seek close, personal relationships. Exposed to changing and often conflicting values, trends, and fashions—disseminated by popular culture, advertising and assorted "experts"—Americans face uncertainties about the best ways to meet important emotional and social needs. How do we establish lasting and intimate personal relationships including marriage? In Extravagant Expectations Paul Hollander investigates how Americans today pursue romantic relationships, with special reference to the advantages and drawbacks of Internet dating compared to connections made in school, college, and the workplace. By analyzing printed personals, dating websites, and advice offered by pop psychology books, he examines the qualities that people seek in a partner and also assesses the influence of the remaining conventional ideas of romantic love. Hollander suggests that notions of romantic love have changed due to conflicting values and expectations and the impact of pragmatic considerations. Individualism, high expectations, social and geographic mobility, changing sex roles, and the American national character all play a part in this fascinating and finally sobering exploration of men and women to find love and meaning in life.

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Since the earliest days of colonial America, the relationship between cotton and the African-American experience has been central to the history of the republic. America's most serious social tragedy, slavery and its legacy, spread only where cotton could be grown. Both before and after the Civil War, blacks were assigned to the cotton fields while a pervasive racial animosity and fear of a black migratory invasion caused white Northerners to contain blacks in the South. Gene Dattel's pioneering study explores the historical roots of these most central social issues. In telling detail Mr. Dattel shows why the vastly underappreciated story of cotton is a key to understanding America's rise to economic power. When cotton production exploded to satiate the nineteenth-century textile industry's enormous appetite, it became the first truly complex global business and thereby a major driving force in U.S. territorial expansion and sectional economic integration. It propelled New York City to commercial preeminence and fostered independent trade between Europe and the United States, providing export capital for the new nation to gain its financial "sea legs" in the world economy. Without slave-produced cotton, the South could never have initiated the Civil War, America's bloodiest conflict at home. Mr. Dattel's skillful historical analysis identifies the commercial forces that cotton unleashed and the pervasive nature of racial antipathy it produced. This is a story that has never been told in quite the same way before, related here with the authority of a historian with a profound knowledge of the history of international finance. With 23 black-and-white illustrations.

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The great American exodus to Paris after World War I included not only writers and artists but journalists. They came by the score, the raw and the accomplished, and in their baggage most carried the dream of eventually becoming poets, short-story writers, or novelists. Meanwhile Paris offered them an overwhelming advantage (coupled with a favorable postwar exchange rate and freedom from Prohibition) by providing jobs that enabled them to remain abroad for extended periods. With the war, American news activity had shifted from London to Paris. The city was now — as one of the arriving newspapermen called it — "the centre of American journalism in Europe," with jobs available on English-language newspapers and magazines, with news services and the foreign bureaus of American publications, and as freelancers of various sorts of writing for a Europe-hungry audience back home. News of Paris recaptures the colorful, often zany world of Paris-American journalists during the glory days of the expatriate period. It does so by concentrating on the lives of such figures as Ernest Hemingway, James Thurber, Henry Miller, Elliot Paul, William L. Shirer, Dorothy Thompson, Janet Flanner, and Eric Sevareid, and on the life of the major newspapers, including the Herald and the Tribune. Others populating its pages include Harold Stearns, Paul Scott Mowrer, Bill Bird, Vincent Sheean, Waverley Root, Eugene Jolas, Martha Foley, Whit Burnett, Ned Calmer, and A. J. Liebling. Ronald Weber aims to add journalists to their rightful place in the story of Americans in Paris at the fabled time when, as Gertrude Stein said, Paris was where the twentieth century was. But in producing this charming, delightfully entertaining book, Mr. Weber has given panache to his purpose. With 8 pages of black-and-white photographs and drawings.

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Since the civil rights era of the 1960s, revisionist historians have been sympathetic to the racial justice motivations of the Radical Republican Reconstruction policies that followed the Civil War. But this emphasis on positive goals and accomplishments has obscured the role of the Republicans in the overthrow of their own program. Rich with insight, Michael W. Fitzgerald's new interpretation of Reconstruction shows how the internal dynamics of this first freedom movement played into the hands of white racist reactionaries in the South. Splendid Failure recounts how postwar financial missteps and other governance problems quickly soured idealistic Northerners on the practical consequences of the Radical Republican plan, and set the stage for the explosion that swept Southern Republicans from power and resulted in Northern acquiescence to the bloody repression of voting rights. The failed strategy offers a chastening example to present-day proponents of racial equality.

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In the 1920s, a revived Ku Klux Klan burst into prominence as a self-styled defender of American values, a magnet for white Protestant community formation, and a would-be force in state and national politics. But the hooded bubble burst at mid-decade, and the social movement that had attracted several million members and additional millions of sympathizers collapsed into insignificance. Since the 1990s, intensive community-based historical studies have reinterpreted the 1920s Klan. Rather than the violent, racist extremists of popular lore and current observation, 1920s Klansmen appear in these works as more mainstream figures. Sharing a restrictive American identity with most native-born white Protestants after World War I, hooded knights pursued fraternal fellowship, community activism, local reforms, and paid close attention to public education, law enforcement (especially Prohibition), and moral/sexual orthodoxy. No recent general history of the 1920s Klan movement reflects these new perspectives on the Klan. One Hundred Percent American incorporates them while also highlighting the racial and religious intolerance, violent outbursts, and political ambition that aroused widespread opposition to the Invisible Empire. Balanced and comprehensive, One Hundred Percent American explains the Klan's appeal, its limitations, and the reasons for its rapid decline in a society confronting the reality of cultural and religious pluralism.

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The sixth winner of the annual New Criterion Poetry Prize is Bill Coyle's The God of This World to His Prophet. Mr. Coyle's first collection of poems spans the divide between the minutely considered trappings of an often hard-bitten and desolate world and the larger, more elusive questions of belief. Shifting easily through registers of sober reflection, gentle satire, and even outright humor, his poems encompass landscape and dramatic situation with equal skill. Decoding the import in a stand of leafless trees or recounting the melancholy ruminations of a solitary figure in winter, Mr. Coyle finds "imaginings / projected on a darkened world of things." Also included are a number of poems translated from the Swedish that dovetail seamlessly with the author's own sensibility and concerns. His virtuosic mastery of prosodic forms, far from occluding his deeply felt subjects, reveals them to us with great force and immediacy. As Mr. Coyle puts it with characteristic precision and grace, "Artifice, at its heart, is the human touch describing / lucidly what the world, stripped to its essence, is."

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Candy Is dandy But liquor Is quicker. These inimitable lines could only have been written by Ogden Nash, the American nonpareil of light verse and one of the most remarkable figures in American letters. His keen grasp of human nature and a unique style of verse made him, in the mid-twentieth century, the most widely read and frequently quoted poet of his time. For years, readers have longed for a biography to match Nash's charm, wit, and good nature; now we have it in Douglas Parker's absorbing and delightful life of the poet. My garden will never make me famous, I'm a horticultural ignoramus, I can't tell a stringbean from a soybean, Or even a girl bean from a boy bean. Ogden Nash grew up in Savannah, Georgia, went to prep school in Newport, Rhode Island, dropped out of Harvard after his freshman year, and soon after started work as an editor with Doubleday. When he began publishing humorous poems in the New Yorker, and later when he worked at the magazine, he became part of the literary circle that included E. B. and Katharine White, Dorothy Parker, Harold Ross, and S. J. Perelman. He went on to publish more than two dozen books of verse as well as screenplays, lyrics and scripts for the theater, children's stories, and essays. Douglas Parker, who has had exclusive access to family letters and diaries, and permission to quote liberally from them and from Nash's poems, has written a warm and inviting biography of the poet who reveled in pure whimsy and wordplay, but who was applauded by his more serious contemporaries. With 12 black-and-white photographs.

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Most readers will find much that is new to them here, and sometimes material that refutes what they thought they knew. Blainey's analysis of the world's great religions alone justifies the book, but it is only part of a broad tapestry that ranges across the entire human experience.-William L. O'Neill

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The most important criticism of the great comedian's work, including pieces by Andrew Sarris, David Thomson, Gilbert Seldes, Alistair Cooke, Robert E. Sherwood, Stark Young, Edmund Wilson, Stanley Kauffmann, Alexander Woollcott, George Jean Nathan, Max Eastman, Robert Warshow, Water Kerr, and James Agee. Richard Schickel, one of our outstanding film critics, has written a long introduction. Praise for Schickel's Chaplin documentary: An invaluable critic and historian.... Schickel's film...is like a course in cultural history taught by a witty, slightly dyspeptic professor.-A. O. Scott, New York Times

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As befits a game traditionally passed from one generation to the next, baseball has always had a special reverence for origins. Claims of being first with any element of the game are disputed with fervor and passion. When the octogenarian Fred Goldsmith died in 1939, a headline proclaimed, 'Goldsmith Dies Insisting He Invented Curve Ball'; Fred Goldsmith understood the secret of immortality. Yet while countless thousands of words have been spilled on the subject of baseball “firsts,” there has been no definitive source for the settlement of disputes. Peter Morris's endlessly fascinating A Game of Inches has now arrived to fill the void. Impeccably researched and engagingly written, this treasure trove will surprise, delight, and educate even the most knowledgeable fan by dispelling cherished myths and revealing the source of many of baseball's features that we now take for granted. The scope of A Game of Inches is encyclopedic, with nearly a thousand entries that illuminate the origins of items ranging from catchers' masks to hook slides to intentional walks to cork-center baseballs. But this is much more than just a reference guide. Award-winning author Peter Morris explains the context that led each new item to emerge when it did, and chronicles the often surprising responses to these innovations. Of few books can it genuinely be said that once you start reading, it's hard to put it down—but A Game of Inches is one of them. It belongs in the pantheon of great baseball books, and will give any reader a deeper appreciation of why baseball matters so much to Americans. (A companion volume, A Game of Inches: The Game Behind the Scenes, was published in the fall of 2006.)

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On election night 1936, Franklin D. Roosevelt was sitting on top of the political world. Within a year, two seismic events would transform the political landscape. A nationwide outbreak of labor unrest, particularly the spread of a new and potent union weapon, the sit-down strike, and FDR's launching of a scheme to overhaul the Supreme Court would combine to generate a fierce public backlash that tarnished Roosevelt's mystique and drained the lifeblood from the New Deal. This is the engrossing story that Robert Shogan relates so compellingly in Backlash.

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The record of civil disobedience by African Americans, which George and Willene Hendrick recount in Why Not Every Man?, begins soon after slaves were brought legally to the American colonies: they began to run away. Through the years of the abolitionists, the struggle against the Fugitive Slave Act, opposition to Jim Crow laws, and the emergence of the civil rights movement, blacks continued the peaceful protest of their inequality and lack of freedom. In addition to describing these often forgotten episodes, the Hendricks show how the idea of civil disobedience, first suggested in America by Henry David Thoreau, crossed oceans to influence Mohandas K. Gandhi, whose thinking in turn attracted a young divinity student named Martin Luther King, Jr. The impact of these ideas was to be profound, forming a central tenet in Dr. King's movement against segregation and for the civil rights of black Americans. The record of civil disobedience in the service of African Americans is not without its failures, but overall it has been a powerful weapon in their quest for a share of the American dream. This is a succinct history of that story.

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For decades young people in the 18-to-34 age group have been the darlings of advertisers and marketers who yearn for greater sales and the elusive "buzz" of publicity. Young adults buy a disproportionate share of movie theater admissions, popular music recordings, and video games, and are regarded as prime targets by most television advertisers. As a consequence of this focus, Leo Bogart argues, media content itself has changed. Sex and violence have become endemic in movies and TV because they attract young audiences. Recent years have witnessed a continual loosening of restrictions on media content and, in the larger culture, a parallel transformation in how people relate to one another. What is now acceptable in civil society is over the edge in comparison with standards of only a few decades ago. This momentous shift has come about, says Mr. Bogart, despite a flawed marketing premise—the idea that young audiences are the most valuable consumers does not jibe with the evidence. Drawing on long experience as a scholar and practitioner in media and marketing, and using extensive research and exclusive interviews with media producers, Mr. Bogart traces the connection between commercial interests and standards of propriety in movies and television. He shows how media content aimed at young adults inevitably engages juveniles as well. He describes how the threat of government regulation has prompted the film, television, music, and video-game industries to adopt systems that rate or label their output; but how the labels intended to keep children away from unsuitable content actually encourage them to taste the forbidden fruit. And these same labels encourage media producers to introduce such content gratuitously. Over the Edge is a compelling analysis of a major American social problem, with surprising conclusions.

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Through the channels of the mass media, celebrity psychologists urge us to realize that society has robbed us of our authentic selves. That every moral standard or prohibition imposes on our selfhoods. That what we have inherited from the past is false. That we ourselves are the only truth in a world of lies. That we must challenge "virtually everything." That we must "wipe the slate clean and start over." Each of these "principles" is a commonplace of pop psychology, and each has almost unimaginably radical implications. Where did pop psychology come from, and what are its promises—and fallacies? How is it that we have elevated people like Phil McGraw, Theodore Rubin, Wayne Dyer, M. Scott Peck, Thomas Harris, John Gray, and many other self-help gurus to priestly status in American culture? In Fool's Paradise, the award-winning essayist Stewart Justman traces the inspiration of the pop psychology movement to the utopianism of the 1960s and argues that it consistently misuses the rhetoric that grew out of the civil rights movement. Speaking as it does in the name of our right to happiness, pop psychology promises liberation from all that interferes with our power to create the selves we want. In so doing, Mr. Justman writes, it not only defies reality but corrodes the traditions and attachments that give depth and richness to human life. His witty and astringent appraisal of the world of pop psychology, which quotes liberally from the most popular sources of advice, is an essential social corrective as well as a vastly entertaining and stimulating book.

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Of the ten thousand letters that Aldous Huxley wrote, only a fraction have been published. Those that were once considered too sensitive for publication can now be included in a wholly new collection. James Sexton's thoughtful selection opens new perspectives on one of the giants of prose. Huxley's letters movingly depict his courageous battle with almost total blindness. Later letters to his patroness demonstrate the brilliance that would soon gain Huxley an international reputation as one of his generation's major satirists. Gradually the letters reveal a shift from cynical satirist to a committed critic of fascism. The letters also provide plentiful insights into the London and New York theater scenes, and vivid discussions of Hollywood's film industry.

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The sudden disappearance of Judge Joseph Crater nearly 75 years ago led to perhaps the most famous missing persons case of the twentieth century. Crater, a justice of New York's state Supreme Court, vanished amid political scandal. Within days, questions arose about Judge Crater's finances and his liaisons with numerous women. A public frenzy about what happened to Crater provided impetus for scrutiny of New York's Tammany Hall political machine—and ultimately for the vanishing of Tammany Hall as well. The cast of characters in this book—the first-ever serious look at the Crater case—includes Franklin D. Roosevelt, the governor who named Crater to the bench; Senator Robert Wagner, Crater's mentor, but also the leader with the most to lose from having Crater found; Al Smith, Tammany's ebbing leader and failed presidential candidate; Jimmy Walker, the rogue Mayor of New York City and the darling of Tammany Hall; and Fiorello La Guardia, the crusading reformer who finally came to power on the back of the scandals. Richard J. Tofel's Vanishing Point is a revealing look at New York as the Jazz Age gave way to the Depression, and at one of the most intriguing stories in the annals of urban America.

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This book reprints a four-hour conversation between Mr. Schickel and Mr. Allen and includes a long essay of introduction by Mr. Schickel, which places Woody Allen's entire career in critical perspective, as well as a complete filmography. Readers will find Mr. Allen's reflections on his major preoccupations—the battle of the sexes; the conflict between reality and fantasy in his major films; mortality, religion, and the role that chance plays in the unfolding of our lives. The book also offers insights into Mr. Allen's working methods as a writer and the growth of his skills as a director.

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In this witty and candid perspective on American television, the Pulitzer Prize–winning critic Howard Rosenberg traces a disturbing pattern: TV's relentless pursuit of the mundane in its seeming quest to dumb-down America. And, he writes, it may be succeeding. How else to interpret the onslaught of look-alike, deceptively titled "reality" shows that have transformed much of prime time into a cratered moonscape? The longer mediocrity endures, Mr. Rosenberg advises, the greater the chance we will become permanently desensitized to it—and seduced by it—making third-rate the standard. He finds occasional heroes but more often rogues. Many of his essays in Not So Prime Time relate to television news, which the author charges has failed dismally in its shrilly self-proclaimed role as a Bethlehem star of enlightenment, its influence continuing to widen in circles that value tabloid over truth. He finds it hard to say, in fact, whether there is more "reality" in Survivor or in a typical newscast on CNN, the Fox News Channel, or MSNBC. News and entertainment now mingle on TV as intimately as singles snorting up together at a cocktail party, becoming interchangeable, with newscasts cross-dressing as theater, and vice versa. Not So Prime Time records how this has happened—not overnight; the crud has been creeping forward for years. Oh the horror.

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Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (the position later to be known as "poet laureate"), editor of Poetry magazine—Karl Shapiro was among the commanding poets of the second half of the twentieth century, yet in many circles he is scarcely remembered today. A recent revival of interest in Shapiro has occurred with the Library of America's volume of his poems, edited by John Updike. Now, in this sparkling collection edited by Robert Phillips, Shapiro's most trenchant writings on poetry, poets, and cultural matters are once again available. They display the intelligence, power, and intellectual courage that made Shapiro one of the most important essayists of his generation. He was "a lively and slashing critic," Joseph Epstein has written, "and reading him one feels windows opening, clouds passing, sunlight, and a fresh breeze entering the room." Creative Glut contains twenty essays on such poets and writers as Eliot, Pound, Yeats, Auden, William Carlos Williams, Dylan Thomas, D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, and Randall Jarrell, and on questions of poetry and American culture that Shapiro felt as urgent, including his celebrated pieces "In Defense of Ignorance" and "To Abolish Children." In all, this is a savory slice of some of the most challenging criticism of our late century.

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Trenchant prose writings on poetry, poets, and cultural matters by one of the most important essayists of his generation. Edited with an Introduction by Robert Phillips. A lively and slashing critic...reading him one feels windows opening, clouds passing, sunlight, and a fresh breeze entering the room. —Joseph Epstein

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It will soon be a hundred years since the death of Anton Chekhov. He was apt to remark that immortality is rubbish, but what has happened to his creative legacy in the last century matches all of man’s metaphors that express the idea of immortality. And the process continues, overcoming boundaries of time and space, and taking different form in different countries. In this luminous book of criticism, Chekhov’s foremost Russian interpreter offers to Western readers a remarkably clear and commanding appraisal of the master’s work. Vladimir Kataev concerns himself chiefly with Chekhov’s unique treatment of a wide range of diverse themes, motifs, and situations. With ringing authority and critical common sense, he examines Chekhov’s major tales, stories, and plays, pointing out patterns of development in Chekhov’s approach to characters and themes, and tracing the roots of Chekhov’s ideas as expressed through his plots. The hallmark of Mr. Kataev’s interpretations is their clarity. No one who has endured tortuous explanations of Chekhov will fail to welcome his lucid criticism. With his careful arguments, he quietly undermines many conventional (and persistent) approaches to Chekhov, Western as well as Russian, and establishes a radically new position of his own.

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Mr. Kimball, one of the best of our cultural critics, offers a lively and penetrating study of genius—and pseudo-genius—at work, and investigates the use and abuse of intelligence. Drawing on figures as various as Plutarch and Hegel, Kierkegaard and P.G. Wodehouse, Elias Canetti and Anthony Trollope, he provides a sharply observed tour of Western intellectual and artistic aspiration. A master of the genre, as collections of his pieces attest, none more impressively than this set. —Booklist Starred Review

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What is life like for children coming of age in an era after feminism, after the sexual revolution? Kay Hymowitz explores the predicament of a generation growing up in a world where adults lavish them with Tommy Hilfigers, Gameboys, and Disneyland vacations but don't know how to provide them with the ordinary truths that give life meaning. Without a coherent moral and intellectual order to pass on to the young, Ms. Hymowitz argues, parents, teachers, school principals, the media, and the child-rearing experts know only how to celebrate the individual child, "empowering" him to find his own way even as MTV beckons. As Liberation's Children shows, some young people flounder in this spiritual and imaginative void. They curse out teachers and coaches; they try too much too soon; they turn from children into tweens by the time they are eight, and into jaded adults by the time they are fourteen. They become the malcontents of suburban communities. Meanwhile many others eagerly latch on to the one value that seems to cause their elders no ambivalence or embarrassment: personal achievement. As babies they listen to Mozart tapes and use lapware; as toddlers they watch Sesame Street and begin music lessons. By the time they are of school age, they are initiates in the religion of "ecstatic capitalism"-child development has become career preparation. In sharply drawn analyses which first appeared in City Journal, Ms. Hymowitz takes the measure of a young generation afflicted with a loss of deep connection, civility, and moral clarity, as well as a depleted vision of the human predicament.

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Prize-winning reporter Robert Shogan draws on the lessons of nine presidential elections to show where the press goes wrong in the making of the president. The media, Mr. Shogan argues, now play the role of enablers. Without fully realizing it, they allow and abet the abuse of the political process by the candidates and their handlers. Shogan has got it right....Bad News is a wake-up call for journalists everywhere. —Sam Donaldson, ABC News. If there is such a thing as a good book about 'bad news,' this is it. —David S. Broder, Washington Post

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Toward the end of his career as a brilliant novelist, Turgenev turned his pen to the essays that comprise these Literary Reminiscences. Here he discusses the character of creative writing, the attitude of the artist to his environment, and the transmutation of the artist's experience into a work of art. He offers, as well, brilliant studies of Pushkin, Gogol, Belinsky, Lermontov, and Krylov, and a penetrating account of his own difficulties in writing Fathers and Sons. There are also descriptions of travels through Italy, simply and beautifully written pieces on country life, and eyewitness accounts of the 1848 political riots in Paris. David Magarshack has provided a first-class translation and has written an introduction which explains and sets the scene for each of the essays. "The best possible introduction to the author a reader could ask for....Turgenev is an uninsistent, lyric meditator, who sees with a precise eye wherever he looks, and whether he is drawing a bead on a quail or escaping from a burning ship, always asks the uncomfortable questions of himself."—New York Herald-Tribune.

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From "Piss Christ" to elephant dung, a decade of art wars has agitated public opinion and incited art world fury but has yielded little conventional wisdom about what ails our art institutions. In this sharp-eyed and authoritative investigation, Lynne Munson identifies an intolerance that overtook the art world in the postmodern era. By exploring the personalities and workings of such major institutions as the National Endowment for the Arts and Harvard University's Department of Fine Arts, she shows how a new dogmatism established itself in museums, academia, and even the artist's studio, where postmodernism favored experimental art at the expense of the traditional, and placed limits on what might be funded, exhibited, studied, and created. Drawing on original research, including more than a hundred interviews with artists, scholars, curators, museum directors, critics, and government officials, Exhibitionism gets behind the façade of the NEA's visual arts program to document its shift from excellence to fashionability; describes how one community of New York painters survived by taking refuge in co-op galleries; examines the "new museology" that has revised not only the content of art exhibitions but the very shape of museums; explains how Harvard's arts program, a one-time beacon for connoisseurial study, has devolved into a theory-driven curriculum nearly divorced from objects. With an eye for art and an ear for politics, Ms. Munson has produced the most important contribution yet to the art debate. With 8 pages of full-color illustrations.

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There are many Stevensons behind the initials RLS, but the one that has endeared him to readers for so long is surely the fighter, battling to stay alive. Jorge Luis Borges described his brief life as courageous and heroic. In Philip Callow’s absorbing new biography, one can see why. Doctors, called repeatedly to what should have been his deathbed, would find a scarecrow, twitching and alive. A sickly child, Louis became in turn a bohemian dandy, a literary gypsy traipsing through the mountains of France with a donkey, and at twenty-eight the lover of an American woman ten years his senior, the fabulous Fanny. He escaped his Scottish town, his family, his friends who had mapped out a literary career for him in London, and instead went chaotically across the Atlantic and overland to California in poverty and despair to reach his beloved, whereupon he escaped into marriage and committed himself to being a nomad. He sailed the Pacific and dreamed of being an explorer; his restlessness was Victorian. With the power of a novelist and the grace of a poet (of which he is both), Philip Callow captures this great writer and his many contradictions. He was a born exile longing for home; a northerner who thrived on tropic sunshine; a near atheist who organized Sunday services for his Samoan workers. He has been called Scotland's finest writer of English prose, a more economical Walter Scott. As an essayist he equaled Hazlitt. In emotional crises he wept openly, to the embarrassment of his wife. “His feelings are always his reasons,” said Henry James, and caught in a sentence the secret of Stevenson’s popularity as one of the last of the classic storytellers. Louis brings him alive. With 8 pages of black-and-white photographs.

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For the vast majority of Americans who lived in rural settings from the seventeenth to the late nineteenth century, the small town provided the most important context for their lives. The town was a focal point and trade center chiefly for farmers but also for fishermen, loggers, miners, and even industrial workers as long as industrial production depended upon waterpower. Rural Americans needed community, and towns filled their economic, political, social, and cultural needs. David Russo’s history of these communities is a unique and engaging work of history, an overview of the founding, development, and varieties of life of American towns from earliest colonial times to the present. His chronicle is wide-ranging in its description but specific in its illustrations of how towns came into existence, grew or declined, gave way to larger urban areas, and finally have reappeared in idealized forms that provide Americans with nostalgia for a past that most of them did not even experience. The most important aspects of real towns, Mr. Russo observes, is their past, their history. With a vast knowledge of the field and a deft use of illustrative facts, he re-creates the universal experience of the small town—its intimacy, its neighborliness, and human scale as well as intolerance, narrow-mindedness, and tendency to exclusivity. American Towns is a richly informed book that fills a large gap in the history of the United States. With 50 black-and-white photographs and drawings.

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One of the great short masterpieces of nineteenth-century thought, Physics and Politics is in essence a brilliant essay in social psychology. It defines with grim humor the conditions of stability and social progress. “Physics” in Bagehot’s book, refers to natural science; “politics” to social science. His vastly stimulating analysis was the first important effort to comprehend the implications of the new science (especially Darwinism) for the study of political affairs. In the process, Bagehot makes unforgettably clear the complex, often tragic relation between individual and collective happiness. Roger Kimball’s introduction and notes place Bagehot’s ideas in perspective for today’s reader and evaluate the continuing usefulness of his observations. "We go to Bagehot for something that seems very difficult to convey accurately through mere definition or single examples—the true character of political man. This character, in turn, is important to discover, because on it depends the possibility of leading a life above ‘physics,’ a life better than that of the jungle."—Jacques Barzun.

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In Kierkegaard in 90 Minutes, Paul Strathern offers a concise, expert account of Kierkegaard's life and ideas, and explains their influence on man's struggle to understand his existence in the world. The book also includes selections from Kierkegaard's work; a brief list of suggested reading for those who wish to push further; and chronologies that place Kierkegaard within his own age and in the broader scheme of philosophy.

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The only play in which Ibsen denies the validity of revolt, The Wild Duck suggest that under certain conditions, domestic falsehoods are entirely necessary to survival. In its open form, its harshly satirical tone, and its unresolved conclusion, the play contains the strongest criticism Ibsen ever directed against himself. Robert Brustein’s new adaptation makes The Wild Duck beautifully playable for today’s audiences.

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“Each of these little books is witty and dramatic and creates a sense of time, place, and character....I cannot think of a better way to introduce oneself and one’s friends to Western civilization.”—Katherine A. Powers, Boston Globe. “Well-written, clear and informed, they have a breezy wit about them....I find them hard to stop reading.”—Richard Bernstein, New York Times. “Witty, illuminating, and blessedly concise.”—Jim Holt, Wall Street Journal. These brief and enlightening explorations of our greatest thinkers bring their ideas to life in entertaining and accessible fashion. Philosophical thought is deciphered and made comprehensive and interesting to almost everyone. Far from being a novelty, each book is a highly refined appraisal of the philosopher and his work, authoritative and clearly presented.

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In Hegel in 90 Minutes, Paul Strathern offers a concise, expert account of Hegel's life and ideas, and explains their influence on man's struggle to understand his existence in the world. The book also includes selections from Hegel's work; a brief list of suggested reading for those who wish to push further; and chronologies that place Hegel within his own age and in the broader scheme of philosophy.

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“Each of these little books is witty and dramatic and creates a sense of time, place, and character....I cannot think of a better way to introduce oneself and one’s friends to Western civilization.”—Katherine A. Powers, Boston Globe. “Well-written, clear and informed, they have a breezy wit about them....I find them hard to stop reading.”—Richard Bernstein, New York Times. “Witty, illuminating, and blessedly concise.”—Jim Holt, Wall Street Journal. These brief and enlightening explorations of our greatest thinkers bring their ideas to life in entertaining and accessible fashion. Philosophical thought is deciphered and made comprehensive and interesting to almost everyone. Far from being a novelty, each book is a highly refined appraisal of the philosopher and his work, authoritative and clearly presented.

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“Each of these little books is witty and dramatic and creates a sense of time, place, and character....I cannot think of a better way to introduce oneself and one’s friends to Western civilization.”—Katherine A. Powers, Boston Globe. “Well-written, clear and informed, they have a breezy wit about them....I find them hard to stop reading.”—Richard Bernstein, New York Times. “Witty, illuminating, and blessedly concise.”—Jim Holt, Wall Street Journal. These brief and enlightening explorations of our greatest thinkers bring their ideas to life in entertaining and accessible fashion. Philosophical thought is deciphered and made comprehensive and interesting to almost everyone. Far from being a novelty, each book is a highly refined appraisal of the philosopher and his work, authoritative and clearly presented.

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The most gripping of Ibsen’s later, brooding self-portraits, The Master Builder explores the nature of a messianic hero pulled down from the heights to reside in the community of men, and now painfully laboring to drag himself up again. Thanks to Mr. Rudall’s fresh translation, the language of the play is no longer archaic or Victorian.

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A vivid portrait of Rubens's enormous life against a background of the turbulent history of his times. Without neglecting his paintings, Ms. Lescourret also gives the reader a fascinating picture of Rubens's career as an accomplished diplomat.

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William Appleman Williams, who died in 1990, was arguably the most influential and controversial historian of his generation. His revisionist writings, especially in American diplomatic history, forced historians and others to abandon old clichés and confront disturbing questions about America's behavior in the world. Williams defined America's social, moral, constitutional, and economic development in uncompromising, iconoclastic, and original terms. He saw history as "a way of learning;" and applied the principle brilliantly in books and essays which have altered our vision of the American past and present. In this rich collection, Henry Berger has drawn from Williams's most important writings—including "The Tragedy of American Diplomacy," "The Contours of American History," and "The Roots of the Modern American Empire" to present his key arguments. There are twenty-one selections in all, from books, essays, and articles, including two never before published. Mr. Berger has added notes to the selections and an enlightening introduction which explores Williams's career and ideas. This is an exceptionally valuable book.

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Anthony Badger’s notably successful history is not simply another narrative of the New Deal, nor does the figure of Franklin Roosevelt loom as large in his account as in some others. What Mr. Badger does so well is to consider important aspects of New Deal activity agriculture, welfare, and politics, interpreting the history of each.

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Children are the largely neglected players in the great drama of American immigration. In one of history's most remarkable movements of people across national borders, almost twenty-five million immigrants came to the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—from Mexico, Japan, and Canada as well as the more common embarkation points of southern and eastern Europe. Many of them were children. Together with the American-born children of immigrants, they made up a significant part of turn-of-the-century U.S. society. Small Strangers recounts and interprets their varied experiences to illustrate how immigration, urbanization, and industrialization—all related processes—molded modern America. Growing up in crowded tenements, insular mill towns, rural ethnic enclaves, or middle-class homes, as they came of age they found themselves increasingly caught between Old World expectations and New World demands. The encounters of these children with ethnic heritage, American values, and mass culture helped shape the twentieth century in a United States still known symbolically around the world as a nation of immigrants.

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