Features

T he forbidden love affair between Lilly Wust and Felice Schragenheim was made for the movies. The setting: World War II Berlin. Lilly, the wife of a German army officer and the mother of four children, met Felice, an aspiring journalist and a Jew. While bombs rained down on Berlin and Lilly’s husband was away […]

D eveloping side by side in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, biography and the novel made private lives public. Abiding interest in the unsolved mystery of personality has kept both these long-winded genres popular–and especially so since the culture of celebrity began to blur the distinctions between them. Today, the life stories of prominent people, […]

I first delved into the reviews posted by readers on Amazon.com for utilitarian reasons. I will soon be publishing a serious nonfiction book; I wanted to know what kind of attention such a book could expect to get from this particular sample of the reading public. My case study, I decided, would be Susan Faludi’s […]

When historians get around to writing the story of American culture at the end of the twentieth century, there will be a place for Stephen L. Carter’s The Culture of Disbelief, a tract for the times that played a small but significant part in the culture wars of the early 1990s. After more than a […]

I n the midst of a bachelor party on FOX’s new show The Street (premiering November 1), a fast-talking securities salesman named Freddie pulls out a wad of cash in an attempt to persuade two strippers to provide extra services. Standing in bikinis and stilettos in the noisy club, they demand equities. “Blue chips, small […]

H ealth care is back on the political front burner. Not that anyone is talking about a major overhaul, like the ill-fated Clinton plan that banished the issue from polite political discourse for nearly six years. Instead, both George W. Bush and Al Gore are targeting isolated pieces of the health care system: prescription drug […]

T he scene looks like the boot camp episode that figures in countless war movies. In the dead quiet of night, young men are rudely roused from their sleep. Ordered to run their hearts out, they slip-slide across treacherous terrain, willing themselves not to collapse since they know that anyone who doesn’t make it will […]

Although Laura Bush’s speech at the GOP convention dealt more with daughters and dolls than politics, Mrs. Bush did make a foray into policy to trumpet her husband’s record on education. “The highly respected nonpartisan RAND study released just last week found that education reforms in Texas have resulted in some of the highest achievement […]

A fter several millennia’s worth of Orpheus-and-Eurydice stories, it stands to reason that Brazilian director Carlos Diegues’s contemporary filmic retelling of the myth, called simply Orfeu, feels like a trip inside a formidable echo chamber. Most distantly, Diegues’s movie rejoins the Orpheus tales of Aeschylus, Virgil, and especially Ovid, whose love-struck, lyre-playing Thracian was a […]

The American Paradox: Spiritual Hunger in an Age of Plenty, by David G. Myers. Yale University Press, 414 pages, $29.95. The Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies, by Robert Edwards Lane. Yale University Press, 465 pages, $35.00. Over the portal of modernity is written Kant’s famous definition: “What is Enlightenment? It is humankind’s emergence from […]