Books, Culture & the Arts

There was a time when readers of The New York Times never knew what they were missing. You had to run down to Hotaling’s, the out-of-town newsstand in Times Square, to check The Washington Post or the Los Angeles Times, or wait a few days for the Manchester Guardian. Or you subscribed to I.F. Stone’s […]

The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America By John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge • Penguin • 464 pages • $25.95 The recent history of American politics can be told as the story of two alliances — one made and unmade by the Democrats, one made and kept by the Republicans. The […]

The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How It Has Undermined Women By Susan J. Douglas and Meredith W. Michaels, Free Press, 383 pages, $26.00 Maternal Desire: On Children, Love, and the Inner Life By Daphne de Marneffe, Little, Brown, 401 pages, $25.95 The natives are restless again. For the past […]

Red Sky at Morning: America and the Crisis of the Global Environment By James Gustave Speth, Yale University Press, 299 pages, $24.00 More than 30 years ago, in 1972, the Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment put the world on notice, warning that the rapidly expanding human enterprise was jeopardizing the stability […]

Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity By Lawrence Lessig, The Penguin Press, 345 pages, $24.95 In the mid-1990s, Alex Alben pioneered a new Hollywood genre: a DVD retrospective on an actor’s career, structured around contemporary interviews with the actor but including clips […]

Plan of Attack By Bob Woodward, Simon & Schuster, 480 pages, $28.00 Future historians will point to two interrelated foreign-policy disasters that could make George W. Bush a one-term president, if the voters pay attention. The first is the well-documented failure of the Bush administration to take al-Qaeda seriously enough, both before and […]

Anti-Americanism By Jean-François Revel, translated from the French by Diarmid Cammell, Encounter Books, 280 pages, $25.95 On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (And Always Have) in the Future Tense By David Brooks, Simon and Schuster, 352 pages, $25.00 Jean-François-Revel, author of the best-selling Without Marx or Jesus, wrote Anti-Americanism to […]

Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill had not yet visited the United States when they completed Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny (Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny). Luckily, they didn’t let this deter them from pretending they had. Brecht’s libretto, one of the most wild-eyed and unflattering portraits of this country ever put […]

If Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ is a problem, what is the problem, and whose problem is it, anyway? There are in fact two problems, and their relationship is both oblique and shadowy. The most important is the film’s anti-Semitism. Gibson and his screenwriter, Benedict Fitzgerald, say they didn’t intend to make an […]

The American Dream and the Public Schools By Jennifer Hochschild and Nathan Scovronick, Oxford University Press, 301pages, $35.00 Beneath all the controversies that roil America’s public schools — bilingual education, school choice, inclusion of children with disabilities, alternative approaches to instruction, and so on — is there one fundamental conflict and one master […]