Books, Culture & the Arts

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 […]

Restoring the Lost Constitution: The Presumption of Liberty By Randy E. Barnett, Princeton University Press, 357 pages, $32.50 Except for conservative activists and a few academics, virtually no one pays attention to right-wing legal theories. But if, as promised, George W. Bush in a second term hands the federal judiciary over to acolytes […]

In 1954, James T. Farrell published a collection of essays called Reflections at Fifty. It is long since out of print, like most of his novels and, so far as I can tell, all of his nonfiction volumes. Digging it out now, Reflections is a reminder of what the author of Studs Lonigan was like […]

George Herbert Walker Bush (Penguin Lives Series) By Tom Wicker, Lipper/Viking, 228 pages, $19.95 Who would have thought just a few years ago that George Herbert Walker Bush would, to put it a bit cruelly, be relevant again? When he left office in January 1993, ceding the White House to a new party, […]

The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic By Chalmers Johnson, Metropolitan Books, 400 pages, $25.00 America Unbound: The Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy By Ivo H. Daalder and James M. Lindsay, The Brookings Institution, 246 pages, $22.95 President George W. Bush’s foreign policy has been nothing if not […]

Backstory: Inside the Business of News By Ken Auletta, Penguin, 296 pages, $24.95 All the News That’s Fit to Sell: How the Market Transforms Information into News By James T. Hamilton, Princeton University Press, 342 pages, $35.00 There’s a lot of muttering nowadays about the future of a minor, almost wholly owned subsidiary […]

Closing the Leadership Gap: Why Women Can and Must Help Run the World By Marie C. Wilson, Viking Press, 256 pages, $24.95 Americans are currently living under the most stereotypically male leadership we have seen in decades, if not longer. The president is a parody of the swaggering, steely-eyed gunfighter; the vice president […]

In Defense of Globalization By Jagdish Bhagwati, Oxford University Press, 296 pages, $28.00 When N. Gregory Mankiw, chairman of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers, declared in February that the outsourcing of jobs to foreign countries was a good thing, he was only saying what advocates of free trade have always believed. But […]

The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, The White House, and the Education of Paul O’Neill By Ron Suskind, Simon & Schuster, 348 pages, $26.00 George W. Bush has had a cold winter, and it’s not chiefly the Democrats’ doing. The weapons of mass destruction in Iraq — and with them the raison […]