Books, Culture & the Arts

The Missing Peace: The Inside Story of the Fight for Middle East Peace By Dennis Ross • Farrar, Straus and Giroux • 864 pages • $35.00 The historic Camp David talks during the summer of 2000 failed, so the conventional wisdom goes, because Yasir Arafat rejected an extraordinarily generous offer that Ehud […]

On the Take: How Medicine’s Complicity With Big Business Can Endanger Your Health By Jerome P. Kassirer • Oxford University Press • 288 pages • $28.00 The $800 Million Pill: The Truth Behind the Cost of New Drugs By Merrill Goozner • University of California Press • 297 pages • $24.95 Powerful Medicines: […]

War and the American Presidency By Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. • Norton • 224 pages • $23.95 America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism By Anatol Lieven • Oxford University Press • 304 pages • $30.00 It has become a cliché to hurl back at President George W. Bush his […]

What’s the Matter With Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America By Thomas Frank • Metropolitan Books • 320 PAGES• $24.00 Homegrown Democrat: A Few Plain Thoughts From the Heart of America By Garrison Keillor • Viking • 237 PAGES • $19.95 Few developments have changed American politics more in the […]

He was, per Jean-Paul Sartre, “the most complete human being of our age.” Not to be outdone, Susan Sontag eulogized him as “the clearest, most unequivocal image of the humanity of the world-wide revolutionary struggle unfolding today.” He, of course, is Ernesto “Che” Guevara, although the key word in Sontag’s formulation is neither “humanity” nor […]

Arguing About War By Michael Walzer • Yale University Press • 225 pages • $25.00 The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror By Michael Ignatieff • Princeton University Press • 160 pages • $22.95 It is not easy to weave together the various shorthand critiques of the Bush […]

The Second Bill of Rights: FDR’s Unfinished Revolution — and Why We Need It More Than Ever By Cass R. Sunstein • Basic Books • 294 pages • $25.00 Most of the world’s constitutions include three kinds of rights: civil, political, and social. The U.S. Constitution, however, makes no mention of “social rights,” and the […]

Is she or isn’t she? That is the question stalking Meryl Streep’s portrayal of a power-mad senator in The Manchurian Candidate. Is the actress pulling a Hillary or what? In June, Matt Drudge fanned the rumors prior to the film’s release, linking to a blogger who claimed that Paramount Pictures had found Streep’s “brilliantly scary […]

Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity By Samuel P. Huntington • Simon & Schuster • 408 pages • $27.00 Samuel Huntington, the Harvard political scientist and author of The Clash of Civilizations, argues in his new book that America (he calls the United States “America” throughout) cannot continue to open […]

My Life By Bill Clinton • Knopf • 957 pages • $35.00 Presidential memoirs are among the worst of all literary genres. That is not because they are invariably self-serving and less than wholly honest. Even the greatest memoirs are both. It is because they are relentlessly inauthentic. One can read the memoirs of virtually […]