Features

The first thing I did after finishing Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation was to go into the kitchen, slice up some potatoes, and make my own french fries. I sprinkled salt over them, omitted the ketchup, and ate the fries one by one, slowly, savoringly. At the same time, I tried to recall my distant […]

Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the american Consensus, Rick Perlstein. Hill and Wang, 671 pages, $30.00. Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right, by Lisa McGirr. Princeton University Press, 395 pages, $31.95. The rise of the right has been a subject of fascination to writers on […]

Poor, old Robert Frost–destined to be knocked around as a political tennis ball ever since that day in December 1960 when John F. Kennedy called him at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and asked if he would read a poem at the upcoming inauguration. According to Frost biographer Jay Parini, Kennedy first suggested that Frost […]

Even before September 11, hardly anyone was advocating terrorism—not even those who regularly practice and support it. The practice is indefensible now that it has been recognized, like rape or murder, as an attack upon the innocent. The victims of a terrorist attack are ordinary men and women, eternal bystanders. There is no special reason […]

For years Harper and Row featured a blurb on thefront cover of George Lawrence’s 1966 translation of Alexis de Tocqueville’sclassic Democracy in America: “Tocqueville, whose brilliance has always been granted by academics, is now accessible to readers who don’t mind brilliance as long as it is readable.” Apparently, though, it’s not been obvious to everyone […]