In striking a balance between the drearier and more inspirational aspects of their tale, the co-authors of Radicals in America: The U.S. Left Since the Second World War, tend, on balance, to emphasize the positive. As they argue in their introduction, although the “radical left has always been a minority current” in the United States, it has “propelled major changes and frequently given shape to what Americans broadly take as the nation’s core traditions.”
In There Goes My Social Life Dash believes she can see outside herself because she has placed herself outside the mainstream of her racial group by being a conservative Republican. But this move has given her distance, not perspective.
What rings clear throughout Szwed’s otherwise perplexing archive of a complex life, is the “consistency and taste” Billie Holiday “brought to nearly every performance” under all kinds of material, physical, and emotional circumstances.
In a finely drawn outline of a life that was filled with activity, with meetings, with far-reaching observations and brilliant imaginings, Andrea Wulf has made a wonderful contribution to the record of Humboldt’s life and work.
Despite the recent trend in American scholarship emphasizing the transnational and cross-cultural dimensions of American culture, Victor Séjour is rarely mentioned. Elèna Mortara’s Writing For Justice: Victor Séjour, the Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara in the Age of Transatlantic Emancipations addresses this gap.
When the aged enter the realm of digital virtual reality.
The magic trick that Chast performs in her cartoons is to make laughter out of the dirty secret of life: it is an alternately stressful and humdrum affair, and then it is over.
No one—in either real or reel life—wants to confront the difficulties of aging, the imminence of dying. The point is best proved by Leo McCarey’s glorious Make Way for Tomorrow (1937), the most unbearably moving and resolutely unsparing work Hollywood has ever made about the elderly.
Harry G. Frankfurt, the Princeton philosopher who previously expounded On Bulls—t argues that we are keeping our eye on the wrong ball in current conversations regarding economic justice.
For readers who are new in town, this volume is a tour through a Washington they will not learn about in any guidebook. For others, reading this collection is like, yes, flying home.
