David Kirp

Erin Brockovich is the quintessential star vehicle–for nearly two hours, Julia Roberts is almost never out of camera range–but it’s also the kind of message movie we haven’t seen for a while. It’s the latest and biggest of the “feisty woman” movies, eponymously titled and mostly true tales of working women who, against impossibly long […]

T he scene looks like the boot camp episode that figures in countless war movies. In the dead quiet of night, young men are rudely roused from their sleep. Ordered to run their hearts out, they slip-slide across treacherous terrain, willing themselves not to collapse since they know that anyone who doesn’t make it will […]

N ovelists delight in retailing life and times in the academy. Write about what you know, the adage goes, and many authors stay solvent by teaching their craft to the next generation of literary hopefuls. Besides, what transpires in the intellectual padded cells of institutions of higher learning provides ample fodder for stories told out […]

Honky, by Dalton Conley. University of California Press, 231 pages, $22.50. All Souls: A Family Story from Southie, by Michael Patrick MacDonald. Ballantine (paper), 266 pages, $14.00. In the 1970s, when Dalton Conley was growing up, Avenue D on New York City’s Lower East Side was a dicey place. Masaryk Towers, the housing project where […]

The avalanche of publicity for Hannibal has made it the most widely anticipated film of the season. Small wonder: Only the bravest of moviemakers would dare to carry on the story of Hannibal Lecter and Clarice Starling, told with such stunning effect 10 years ago in Silence of the Lambs. That these stories are meant […]

Loss within Loss: Artists in the Age of AIDS, edited by Edmund White. University of Wisconsin Press, 305 pages, $29.95. In the aftermath of the terse 1981 announcement by the Centers for DiseaseControl (CDC) that a strange new disease was killing homosexuals, gay menmastered the art of throwing a funeral. This was not something for […]