Features

Severed Trust: Why American Medicine Hasn’t Been Fixed, by Dr. George D. Lundberg, M.D., with James Stacey. Basic Books, 371 pages, $26.00. “Remember, the job of a medical journal editor is to shed light, … to be the conscience of the profession.” Dr. George Lundberg got this kind of advice from fellow medical editors and […]

The Price of Motherhood: Why the Most Important Job in the World Is Still the Least Valued, by Ann Crittenden. Metropolitan Books, 323 pages, $25.00. The Invisible Heart: Economics and Family Values, by Nancy Folbre. The New Press, 267 pages, $24.95. In The Price of Motherhood, economics journalist Ann Crittenden draws on […]

Moral Freedom: The Search for Virtue in a World of Choice, by Alan Wolfe. W.W. Norton 224 pages, $24.95. As every parent knows, sometimes the only answer to “Why?” is “Because I say so.” For a long time that was, at least in form, the most common answer to society’s ultimate why question: “Why be […]

Tip O’Neill and the Democratic Century, by John A. Farrell. Little, Brown and Company, 776 pages, $29.95. Jimmy Breslin called Tip O’Neill “a lovely spring rain of a man” and John A. Farrell proves Breslin right in Tip O’Neill and the Democratic Century. Farrell, a prizewinning veteran reporter for The Boston Globe, has written a […]

Harvard University has a famous tradition known locally as “every tub on its own bottom.” Translated, that means that each faculty or school of the university is responsible for raising most of its own research money, and finders are keepers. The Harvard name, of course, is ample bait to attract all sorts of funders,savory and […]

Visionaries and Outcasts: The NEA, Congress, and the Place of the Visual Arts in America, by Michael Brenson. The New Press, 157 pages, $25.00. In the United States, we like our artists nobly bereft, taking literallyPercy Bysshe Shelley’s description of poets as “the unacknowledged legislators ofthe world.” When artists stoop to seek acknowledgment, the priestly […]

Loss within Loss: Artists in the Age of AIDS, edited by Edmund White. University of Wisconsin Press, 305 pages, $29.95. In the aftermath of the terse 1981 announcement by the Centers for DiseaseControl (CDC) that a strange new disease was killing homosexuals, gay menmastered the art of throwing a funeral. This was not something for […]

PC, M.D.: How Political Correctness Is Corrupting Medicine, by Sally Satel, M.D. Basic Books, 256 pages, $27.00. Are you concerned about the fact that 44 million Americans lack healthinsurance and that millions of senior citizens are struggling to pay for medicineprescribed by their doctors? Are you troubled by the denial of necessary care byHMOs–or by […]

The advent of television has long been associated with the beginning of the endof the “good old days.” Historians, sociologists, filmmakers, and yes, even TVshows (think Brooklyn Bridge and The Wonder Years) have explored this relationship. In his 1990 film Avalon, Barry Levinson heartbreakingly rendered the effects of TV on three generations of an immigrant […]

Pick up the newspaper or tune in to a Sunday morning TV gabfest and you’re likely to read or hear about the sizable majority of Americans who approve of voucher plans–school choice, as proponents put it. These assertions are sustained by the holy writ of the public opinion poll, rooted in random sample, buffered by […]