Books, Arts and Culture

Downsizing in America: Reality, Causes, and Consequences By William J. Baumol, Alan S. Blinder and Edward N. Wolff, Russell Sage Foundation, 321 pages, $29.95 The Betrayal of Work: How Low-Wage Jobs Fail 30 Million Americans and Their Families By Beth Shulman, The New Press, 255 pages, $25.95 Back in 1994, the late, […]

The Substance of Style: How the Rise of Aesthetic Value Is Remaking Commerce, Culture, and Consciousness By Virginia Postrel, HarperCollins, 237 pages, $24.95 Virginia Postrel’s The Substance of Style joins David Brooks’ Bobos in Paradise in a new kind of conservative cultural criticism. The recipe is simple: Charmingly describe a new cluster […]

Americans, thankfully, are not being gunned down in disputes over political correctness. But disputes over who should decide which ideas should circulate where are very much in play. In fact, a new front has opened. On Oct. 21, the House of Representatives declared incontrovertibly that, “The events and aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001, have underscored […]

The Battle of Algiers is back — along with The Battle of Algiers scenario. At a time when Gillo Pontecorvo’s documentary-style account of a bloody, anti-colonialist urban uprising has been used by commentators from Tariq Ali to Zbigniew Brzezinski to describe the situation in occupied Iraq, and only months after a well-publicized screening at the […]

New Jersey Dreaming: Capital, Culture and the Class of ’58 By Sherry B. Ortner, Duke University Press, 334 PAGES, $29.95 Sometimes the announcement of a book just leaps out of a publisher’s catalog and grabs you by the throat, and such was the case with this study by Sherry Ortner, a MacArthur Prize- […]

Firing Back: Against the Tyranny of the Market By Pierre Bourdieu, Translated by Loïc Wacquant, New Press, 112 PAGES, $14.95 At the time of Pierre Bourdieu’s death in January 2002, he stood as the dominant intellectual in France, if not in Europe. Only Jürgen Habermas in Germany, now age 74, is of the […]

The Roaring Nineties By Joseph E. Stiglitz, W.W. Norton and Company, 379 pages, $25.95 Like many academic economists, Joseph E. Stiglitz went into government hoping to tutor as well as to serve. Unlike most, Stiglitz has significant doubts about whether markets usually work as advertised. His research in this genre won him the […]

Party of the People: A History of the Democrats By Jules Witcover, Random House, 758 pages, $35.00 Grand Old Party: A History of the Republicans By Lewis L. Gould, Random House, 588 pages, $35.00 Few institutions of any sort in American life have remained relevant for as long as the two national […]