Idea and reality are often miles apart, especially when it comes to business schemes. It’s a Panglossian truism displayed a few weeks ago with the release of Ed Klein’s The Truth About Hillary, the first high-visibility title from Sentinel, the imprint of the august publishing house Penguin that was launched in August 2004 for the […]
Books, Culture & the Arts
Posted inBooks, Arts and Culture
Left Church
Exodus: Why Americans are Fleeing Liberal Churches for Conservative Christianity by David Shiflett (Sentinel, 224 pages, $23.95) Losing Moses on the Freeway: The 10 Commandments in America by Chris Hedges (Free Press, 224 pages, $24.00) These are tough times for liberal Christians. To hear most members of the media tell it, “liberal Christian” […]
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Up With Rags
A Matter of Opinion by Victor S. Navasky (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 464 pages, $27.00) When I was in college and a member of my university’s Liberal Party, a common question posed to candidates for party office was a dichotomy: “New Republic or Nation?” (The American Prospect did not yet exist.) Most people didn’t […]
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Learning from Iraq
Sands of Empire: Missionary Zeal, American Foreign Policy, and the Hazards of Global Ambition by Robert W. Merry (Simon & Schuster, 320 pages, $26.00) Squandered Victory: The American Occupation and Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq by Larry Diamond (Times Books, 369 pages, $25.00) As the insurgency rages on in Iraq and the […]
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Now Museum, Now You Don’t
A May fund-raiser at the Barnes Foundation in Merion, Pennsylvania, on Philadelphia’s Main Line, drew some 300 people for cocktails and an auction for trips to Europe and dinner for 20 at the foundation in the main gallery, ringed by Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and Paul Cezanne masterpieces. Drinks and donor perks feed the museum […]
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Starving for Your Job
The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century by Thomas L. Friedman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 496 pages, $27.50) I opened Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat expecting another paean to globalization, and though it surely is that, this book is also a well-reported, original, and nuanced discussion that every […]
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A Life of One’s Own
The Ethics of Identity by Kwame Anthony Appiah (Princeton University Press, 384 pages, $29.95) Many of us, when we pause to reflect on the larger questions, tend to think of our lives as vast projects that we are responsible for planning, organizing, and living out to completion. We often think, in fact, that a […]
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Lightning, Camera, Action
By J. Hoberman Can photographs, motion pictures, and television create social change? Or would it be more accurate to say that these camera-based forms construct a social reality? Michael Moore notwithstanding, the ultimate test case appeared 90 years ago: D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, released throughout America in the spring of 1915, remains […]
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The Democracy Solution
Not long after George W. Bush delivered his June 2002 speech severing relations with Yasir Arafat, a White House reporter wondered whether Natan Sharansky had become one of the president’s speechwriters. By the time of President Bush’s second inaugural, in January 2005, reporters no longer had to guess at Sharansky’s influence. The previous November, the […]
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Their Babies Are Everything
Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage by Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas (University of California Press, 312 pages, $24.95) In the American pantheon of evildoers, “welfare moms” easily outrank rotten CEOs, corrupt defense contractors, and media moguls who sell sex and sensation. No group has been as demonized, […]
