Books, Arts and Culture

Is she or isn’t she? That is the question stalking Meryl Streep’s portrayal of a power-mad senator in The Manchurian Candidate. Is the actress pulling a Hillary or what? In June, Matt Drudge fanned the rumors prior to the film’s release, linking to a blogger who claimed that Paramount Pictures had found Streep’s “brilliantly scary […]

Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity By Samuel P. Huntington • Simon & Schuster • 408 pages • $27.00 Samuel Huntington, the Harvard political scientist and author of The Clash of Civilizations, argues in his new book that America (he calls the United States “America” throughout) cannot continue to open […]

My Life By Bill Clinton • Knopf • 957 pages • $35.00 Presidential memoirs are among the worst of all literary genres. That is not because they are invariably self-serving and less than wholly honest. Even the greatest memoirs are both. It is because they are relentlessly inauthentic. One can read the memoirs of virtually […]

A Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa By Howard W. French • Knopf • 280 pages • $25.00 The appointments of Colin Powell as secretary of state and Condoleezza Rice as the president’s national-security adviser raised hopes in some quarters that the United States would begin to take more serious interest […]

The Cheating Culture: Why More Americans Are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead By David Callahan • Harcourt • 353 pages • $26.00 Few decisions caused George Washington more agony than whether or not to accept some canal-company shares that the Virginia General Assembly offered him in 1784. The gift was perfectly legal, […]

There was a time when readers of The New York Times never knew what they were missing. You had to run down to Hotaling’s, the out-of-town newsstand in Times Square, to check The Washington Post or the Los Angeles Times, or wait a few days for the Manchester Guardian. Or you subscribed to I.F. Stone’s […]

The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America By John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge • Penguin • 464 pages • $25.95 The recent history of American politics can be told as the story of two alliances — one made and unmade by the Democrats, one made and kept by the Republicans. The […]

The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How It Has Undermined Women By Susan J. Douglas and Meredith W. Michaels, Free Press, 383 pages, $26.00 Maternal Desire: On Children, Love, and the Inner Life By Daphne de Marneffe, Little, Brown, 401 pages, $25.95 The natives are restless again. For the past […]

Red Sky at Morning: America and the Crisis of the Global Environment By James Gustave Speth, Yale University Press, 299 pages, $24.00 More than 30 years ago, in 1972, the Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment put the world on notice, warning that the rapidly expanding human enterprise was jeopardizing the stability […]

Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity By Lawrence Lessig, The Penguin Press, 345 pages, $24.95 In the mid-1990s, Alex Alben pioneered a new Hollywood genre: a DVD retrospective on an actor’s career, structured around contemporary interviews with the actor but including clips […]