Features

T he Big Moment in the early episodes of the Fox Network’s Boston Public comes at a school board meeting called by the superintendent–an enemy of Winslow High School’s tough-love overseer, Principal Harper–to address the principal’s handling of a teacher who brandished a gun in his classroom, a soccer team that tried to download test […]

Searching for America’s Heart: RFK and the Renewal of Hope, Peter Edelman. Houghton Mifflin, 272 pages, $26.00. Peter Edelman views the last decades of twentieth-century American social policy through a unique lens. As an aide to New York Senator Robert F. Kennedy, then as policy director for Kennedy’s 1968 presidential campaign, Edelman watched and participated […]

Sovereign Virtue: The Theory and Practice of Equality, Ronald Dworkin. Harvard University Press, 511 pages, $35.00. About halfway through Sovereign Virtue, I came across an intriguing paragraph. Ronald Dworkin is discussing Lochner v. New York, an infamous 1905 decision in which a conservative majority of the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a statute limiting the […]

It Didn’t Happen Here: Why Socialism Failed in the United States, Seymour Martin Lipset and Gary Marks. W.W. Norton and Company, 79 pages, $26.95. Seymour Martin Lipset and Gary Marks have written a cold and bloodless book that dissects the failure of socialism in America the way a forensic pathologist would slice into, pick apart, […]

Rock critics a few years back coined the clever term miserablism to describe a brand of guitar music light in metallic crunch but heavy with emotional self-flagellation. It wasn’t a compliment, exactly. Yet with songs like “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now,” bands such as the Smiths and their flamboyant lead singer Morrissey proclaimed their angst […]

Abraham Lincoln was born poor on the rugged frontier. He was physically odd, ugly even, and prone to despair. But he educated himself, elevated himself, and struck the first fatal blows against slavery. While saving the union, he also made it “the last best hope of earth.” While winning an awful war, he pledged “malice […]

The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else, Hernando de Soto. Basic Books, 276 pages, $27.50. Solving third-world poverty is the alchemy of economics. For decades international-development specialists have searched for the magical combination of programs and policies that would transform poor countries into rich, advanced economies. But all […]

Americans are ideological conservatives and operational liberals. That was the finding of social psychologists Lloyd A. Free and Hadley Cantril, who based much of The Political Beliefs of Americans, their classic work about public opinion, on a massive survey they conducted during the fall of 1964. As ideological conservatives, Americans are skeptical about the “role […]

Honky, by Dalton Conley. University of California Press, 231 pages, $22.50. All Souls: A Family Story from Southie, by Michael Patrick MacDonald. Ballantine (paper), 266 pages, $14.00. In the 1970s, when Dalton Conley was growing up, Avenue D on New York City’s Lower East Side was a dicey place. Masaryk Towers, the housing project where […]

W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919-1963, David Levering Lewis. Henry Holt, 715 pages, $35.00. David Levering Lewis won the Pulitzer Prize in 1994 forW.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868-1919. The Du Bois portrayed in that volume is a brilliant youth and later a powerful idealist who wrote […]