Books, Culture & the Arts

The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton by Jerome Karabel (Houghton Mifflin, 684 pages, $28.00) In 1958 a young British sociologist and Labour Party official named Michael Young published a book called The Rise of the Meritocracy, coining the now-commonplace term. A mock sociology doctoral dissertation […]

More Equal Than Others: America From Nixon to the New Century by Godfrey Hodgson (Princeton University Press, 379 pages, $29.95) Restless Giant: The United States From Watergate to Bush v. Gore by James T. Patterson (Oxford University Press, 448 pages, $35.00) Anyone wishing to understand the United States in the three decades after World […]

Three Billion New Capitalists: The Great Shift of Wealth and Power to the East by Clyde Prestowitz (Basic Books, 278 pages, $26.95) Globalization: Why It Works by Martin Wolf (Yale University Press, 398 pages, $30.00) Will the United States benefit from the new wave of globalization sweeping the economy, as it did from […]

The irresistible force of America’s post–World War II Red Scare first slammed into the immovable object of network television in September 1953, when the House Un-American Activities Committee revealed that TV’s biggest star had registered to vote in the 1936 election as a Communist. The redhead was a Red. For the next week, Lucille Ball […]

Becoming Justice Blackmun: Harry Blackmun’s Supreme Court Journey by Linda Greenhouse (Times Books, 258 pages, $25.00) The day that former president Lyndon Johnson died, January 22, 1973, Justice Harry Blackmun announced the Supreme Court’s 7-to-2 decision in Roe v. Wade, legalizing abortion throughout the nation. The media led with Johnson’s passing, while Blackmun, […]

Night Draws Near: Iraq’s People in the Shadow of America’s War by Anthony Shadid (Henry Holt & Co., 448 pages, $26.00) The relentless carnage and rising illiberalism of Iraq are inducing shellshock in the advocates of the war. Among conservatives, the palpable despair has prompted dead-enders at The Wall Street Journal to bitterly […]

Looking at the reactions of the right-wingers to l’affaire Novak-Rove-Wilson-Plame, you’d have to conclude that, for them, national security is a sometime thing — a talking point or a symbolic flourish, but not a real-world imperative involving actual lives, dangers, and government workings. The smears and (to be generous) fat, sloppy errors directed against former […]

Advice and Consent: The Politics of Judicial Appointments by Lee Epstein and Jeffrey A. Segal (Oxford University Press, 192 pages, $23.00 ) When John Roberts testified before the Senate in 2003 on his nomination to a federal appellate court, he described a process that had been used to vet judicial candidates while […]

The Opportunity: America’s Moment to Alter History’s Course by Richard N. Haass (Public Affairs, 242 pages, $25.00) Gulliver Unbound: America’s Imperial Temptation and the War in Iraq by Stanley Hoffmann with Frederic Bozo (Rowman and Littlefield, 168 pages, $19.95) Some books derive their significance not only from what they say but also from who […]

California Rising: The Life and Times of Pat Brown by Ethan Rarick (University of California Press, 501 pages, $29.95) On the rainy January morning in 1959 when Pat Brown took the oath as governor of California, he delivered an inaugural address that today would stun listeners as breathtakingly bold, if not suicidal. Seven times […]