Books, Arts and Culture

Off Center: The Republican Revolution and the Erosion of American Democracy by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson (Yale University Press, 272 pages, $25.00) Most observers expected at the beginning of 2001 that George W. Bush would pursue a moderate course in office. Some thought he would do so because they’d been duped by […]

The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln by Sean Wilentz (W.W. Norton & Company, 969 pages, $35.00) During the early 20th century, “Progressive historians” interpreted the American past as an epic struggle to perfect a democratic republic for the common people. Adopting the great American taste for moral melodrama, they cast Thomas […]

In his advance publicity work for Commander in Chief, series creator Rod Lurie told the press that the show — ABC’s new drama about the first female president — was distinctly “anti-partisan.” Oh please, Rod; it’s a lefty wish come true. The audience at the Washington screening put on by the nonprofit women’s group The […]

The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton by Jerome Karabel (Houghton Mifflin, 684 pages, $28.00) In 1958 a young British sociologist and Labour Party official named Michael Young published a book called The Rise of the Meritocracy, coining the now-commonplace term. A mock sociology doctoral dissertation […]

More Equal Than Others: America From Nixon to the New Century by Godfrey Hodgson (Princeton University Press, 379 pages, $29.95) Restless Giant: The United States From Watergate to Bush v. Gore by James T. Patterson (Oxford University Press, 448 pages, $35.00) Anyone wishing to understand the United States in the three decades after World […]

Three Billion New Capitalists: The Great Shift of Wealth and Power to the East by Clyde Prestowitz (Basic Books, 278 pages, $26.95) Globalization: Why It Works by Martin Wolf (Yale University Press, 398 pages, $30.00) Will the United States benefit from the new wave of globalization sweeping the economy, as it did from […]

The irresistible force of America’s post–World War II Red Scare first slammed into the immovable object of network television in September 1953, when the House Un-American Activities Committee revealed that TV’s biggest star had registered to vote in the 1936 election as a Communist. The redhead was a Red. For the next week, Lucille Ball […]

Becoming Justice Blackmun: Harry Blackmun’s Supreme Court Journey by Linda Greenhouse (Times Books, 258 pages, $25.00) The day that former president Lyndon Johnson died, January 22, 1973, Justice Harry Blackmun announced the Supreme Court’s 7-to-2 decision in Roe v. Wade, legalizing abortion throughout the nation. The media led with Johnson’s passing, while Blackmun, […]

Night Draws Near: Iraq’s People in the Shadow of America’s War by Anthony Shadid (Henry Holt & Co., 448 pages, $26.00) The relentless carnage and rising illiberalism of Iraq are inducing shellshock in the advocates of the war. Among conservatives, the palpable despair has prompted dead-enders at The Wall Street Journal to bitterly […]

Looking at the reactions of the right-wingers to l’affaire Novak-Rove-Wilson-Plame, you’d have to conclude that, for them, national security is a sometime thing — a talking point or a symbolic flourish, but not a real-world imperative involving actual lives, dangers, and government workings. The smears and (to be generous) fat, sloppy errors directed against former […]