Books, Arts and Culture

On democratic wrongs both past and present, as told by two books and a new commission study on reform.

Chris Matthews blows hard. This may sound less like a news flash than a crashing redundancy. And it’s true that yelling is nothing new for the omnipresent MSNBC/CNBC barking head, for whom picking up the pace and pumping up the volume almost always substitute for picking apart the fairy tales that keep the Bush White […]

Once upon a time, American intellectual life featured a ritual known as the Partisan Review symposium. It was a solemn event, combining elements of high Mass and a boxing match. Here is how it worked: Every year or so, the tribal elders, gathering in the journal’s offices in New York, would prepare a list of […]

For God And Country: Faith and Patriotism Under Fire by James Yee (with Aimee Molloy) (PublicAffairs, 240 pages, $24.00) One Woman’s Army: The Commanding General of Abu Ghraib Tells Her Story by Janis Karpinski (with Steven Strasser) (Hyperion, 256 pages, $24.95) War upends ordinary lives. At times, it can catapult individuals, […]

The Powers of War and Peace: The Constitution and Foreign Affairs after 9/11 by John Yoo (University of Chicago Press, 378 pages, $29.00) George W. Bush was caught flat-footed on the morning of September 11, 2001. Intent on exercising executive power without any interference from the courts or Congress, the White House […]

In 1958, writing in the Jesuit weekly America, the historian John Lukacs speculated whether Dwight Macdonald might become “The American Orwell.” Noting that Macdonald’s American “reputation is rising,” Lukacs wrote that he was already known among British intellectuals “as one of the most interesting American critics of these times.” In particular Lukacs lauded Macdonald’s “lonely […]

End of the Line: The Rise and Coming Fall of the Global Corporation by Barry C. Lynn (Doubleday, 312 pages, $26.00) The End of the Line is about the consequences of the “taking apart” of the modern corporation — the outsourcing of operations to the far corners of the world by companies such as Wal-Mart, […]

When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America by Ira Katznelson (W.W. Norton, 238 pages, $25.95) The White House Looks South by William E. Leuchtenburg (Louisiana State University Press, 668 pages, $45.00) White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism by (Kevin M. Kruse Princeton University Press, 325 […]

Devastating as it was, the last presidential election did bestow one blessing on progressives — it cleaned out the art house. The post-election period has swept away much of what had become tiresome or belligerent in political films — the breathless hagiographies of lefty figures or tales of the cackling villainy of the right. Gone […]

Your Money or Your Life by David Cutler (Oxford University Press, 158 pages, $13.95) The Health Care Mess by Rashi Fein and Julius Richmond (Harvard University Press, 320 pages, $26.95) If social security is the third rail of American politics, health-care reform is the treadmill. Not quite so deadly, but far more time-consuming and exhausting. […]