The Indefatigable Reporter As American Hero
Journalism has changed in this internet age, and Hersh is here to tell how it used to be. One cannot help but think today’s world of instant information may not be an improvement for democracy.
By Gerald Early
The Way Some People Lose
Pipes’s book works hard at making Nixon-in-winter a true conservative as he emerged from his worst days of physical and emotional wreckage after leaving Washington to become a kind of consul without portfolio, the eminence grise of the Republican Party.
Take Me Out to The Ball Game
The faith Willie had in me to protect him from anything untoward, even from being hurt by the elements, mirrors the faith I had in my grandfather to protect me from the street gangs when he took me to a game over fifty years ago.
Hooray for Hollywood
To our Puritan, “agrarian” instincts, Hollywood is all that is wrong with America, the decadent city, the sin factory that has warped the culture beyond repair. Here is the trope of American declension.
Hollywood’s Publisher of Peccadilloes
Shocking True Story is a good, though by no means exhaustive or thorough, account of Confidential, Hollywood's publication of record for prurient interests.
Tales of a Working Girl
Day’s characters seemed to give her fans not only a coping fantasy but a sense of inspiration. One of the problems with the intelligentsia is that it will not respect or take seriously any fantasy that is not built on some idea or resistance to hegemony, which Day’s fantasy clearly was not.
Playing the Most Famous Secret Agent in the Whole Wide World
The OO7 Diaries reveals filmmaking as both a nearly heroic exercise in tenacity and an astonishingly pure expression of absurdity.
The Republican Party and What It Means
Republican Character reminds readers that the men and women in politics are rarely ideologically consistent, often opportunistic, and sometimes make strange alliances and unappealing compromises.
The Myth of the Good Son
I suppose mothers are always trying to save their sons. And sons are always making their mothers suffer, always making their mothers need to save them. Despite my stupidity, my unworthiness, my mother was determined to save me anyhow.
Baseball, Race, and the Americas
Alou is one of the best baseball autobiographies of recent years because it offers the story of race and baseball not from a non-American perspective, but from someone who got to know the United States very well as both a resident and a subject of its foreign policy, as both insider and outsider.
The Painful Persistence of Pruitt-Igoe’s Long Goodbye
Some places record the rise and fall of a significant building, or evoke historical events that took place there. Others, like the site where the notorious St. Louis public housing complex known as Pruitt-Igoe once stood, serve less as memorials than material imprints of loss and unresolved histories.
Seasons of the Southpaw
The basic facts are here, from Spahn’s upbringing in Buffalo to his last year in baseball with the New York Mets and San Francisco Giants, as well as some useful quotes but there are two problems with Freedman's book.