Books, Arts and Culture

By J. Hoberman Can photographs, motion pictures, and television create social change? Or would it be more accurate to say that these camera-based forms construct a social reality? Michael Moore notwithstanding, the ultimate test case appeared 90 years ago: D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, released throughout America in the spring of 1915, remains […]

Not long after George W. Bush delivered his June 2002 speech severing relations with Yasir Arafat, a White House reporter wondered whether Natan Sharansky had become one of the president’s speechwriters. By the time of President Bush’s second inaugural, in January 2005, reporters no longer had to guess at Sharansky’s influence. The previous November, the […]

Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage by Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas (University of California Press, 312 pages, $24.95) In the American pantheon of evildoers, “welfare moms” easily outrank rotten CEOs, corrupt defense contractors, and media moguls who sell sex and sensation. No group has been as demonized, […]

Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage by Stephanie Coontz (Viking, 448 pages, $25.95) Gay Marriage: Why It Is Good for Gays, Good for Straights, and Good for America by Jonathan Wauch (Times Books, 224 pages, $22.00) Marriage is a shape-shifting institution if there ever was one. Those […]

Death by a Thousand Cuts: The Fight Over Taxing Inherited Wealth by Michael J. Graetz and Ian Shapiro (Princeton University Press, 392 pages, $29.95) This book about the unlikely success of a small band of the anti-tax rich and their hired hands in attacking the estate tax, the most progressive element of the federal […]

The views of the loser do not typically fill prominent chapters in the history books. We know what Julius Caesar thought of the barbarous tribes in Gaul and Britannia, but almost nothing about what they thought of him. His descriptions of savage resistance to his military campaigns suggest just how much the latter wanted to […]

Every Man a Speculator: A History of Wall Street in American Life by Steven Fraser (HarperCollins, 752 pages, $29.95) Can the New Deal be repealed? Is America’s welfare state, incomplete though it is, so out of sync with the nation’s individualistic ideology and the political power of business that George W. Bush can […]

Liberty and Freedom: A Visual History of America’s Founding Ideas by David Hackett Fischer (Oxford University Press, 851 pages, $50.00) George W. Bush used the word “freedom” 24 times during his second inaugural address. After the president’s handlers rushed out and denied that he was looking to start more wars, George Bush Senior […]

Return to Greatness: How America Lost Its Sense of Purpose and What It Needs to Do to Recover It by Alan Wolfe (Princeton University Press, 224 pages, $22.95) In recent years, the sociologist Alan Wolfe has emerged as one of America’s most astute thinkers about religion, politics, and society. Unlike so many generalists who […]

Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety by Judith Warner (Riverhead, 304 pages, $23.95) The Career Mystique: Cracks in the American Dream by Phyllis Moen and Patricia (Roehling Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 304 pages, $22.95) The Other Women’s Movement: Workplace Justice and Social Rights in Modern America by Dorothy Sue Cobble (Princeton University Press, […]