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Thu, 20 Mar 2008
Divided Soul
Rian Malan stared down the demons of apartheid
By Posted at 09:00 AM Comments (1)
Rian Malan’s one and only meeting with J.M. Coetzee took place in the early 1990s. Malan greatly esteemed his fellow South African writer, and when Coetzee won the Nobel Prize in 2003, he declared that the laureate had “described, more truly than any other, what it was to be white and conscious in the face of apartheid’s stupidities and... Read More
Tue, 5 Feb 2008
Uncomfortable Truth
P. Sainath reminds us that India is still a poor country
By Posted at 09:00 AM
One evening, a couple of summers ago, The Times of India organized a free classical music concert at an amphitheater cut into a hill along Bombay’s coast. It was a stunning locale, with the sea in the distance and twinkling stars overhead. All around the stage, giant canvasses depicted idyllic scenes of a futuristic Bombay—a city whose contemporary counterpart... Read More
Tue, 13 Nov 2007
The Unvanquished
Marshall Frady and the dime-store rascals of southern politics
By Posted at 12:00 PM Comments (1)
A few months before he died in a car accident, David Halberstam published a droll, melancholy homage to his colleague and friend Marshall Frady, who lost a prolonged battle with cancer in 2004. The essay appears as a new introduction to two books by Frady that Simon & Schuster has reissued: Billy Graham: A Parable of American Righteousness (1979)... Read More
Thu, 9 Aug 2007
Bohemian Rhapsodies
Mary Heaton Vorse’s labor reportage
By Posted at 08:30 AM
In April 1952, Harper’s Magazine published “The Pirates’ Nest of New York,” a report on the aftermath of a wildcat strike on the city’s docks. The piece begins with a longshoreman and two activist priests conducting a friendly argument about exactly how a port reformer of an earlier era had been murdered. Was he shot, garroted, or immersed in... Read More
Tue, 12 Jun 2007
On the Rocks
Douglas McCollam on John McPhee's Annals of the Former World
By Posted at 08:30 AM Comments (1)
Annals of the Former World
By John McPhee
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
1998
I first encountered the writer John McPhee about ten years ago on a remote stretch of the Salmon River in the wilds of northern Alaska just inside the Arctic Circle. That’s where he was, at least. I was sitting in the sun outside a... Read More
Thu, 1 Mar 2007
Corps Values
Thomas E. Rick's 1997 book Making the Corps describes a society's relationship to its warriors.
By Posted at 08:30 AM
Early last year, my cousin, a Marine captain based in Okinawa, sent me a Wall Street Journal story about changes in Army basic training at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri. The article had been e-mailed back and forth around the world, from North Carolina to Iraq to Japan, until a dozen little forwarding arrows nudged every line into the right... Read More
Mon, 1 Jan 2007
Benevolent Dreamer
Ben Yagoda on St. Clair McKelway, who wrote with lucidity about his own mental illness.
By Posted at 08:30 AM
Last summer James Wolcott reviewed The Complete New Yorker on DVD for The New Criterion. He concluded with a list of “future topics for inquiry.” Number one with a bullet point was this: “Why does A.J. Liebling remain a vibrant role model for writers while the superb, prolific St. Clair McKelway has been sorely forgotten?” Liebling’s continued popularity is... Read More
