Volume 55, Number 9 · May 29, 2008
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Iraq: Will We Ever Get Out?
By Thomas Powers
There is a working assumption among the American people that a new president enters the White House free of responsibility for the errors of the past, free to set a new course in any program or policy, and therefore free—at the very least in constitutional theory, and perhaps even really and truly free—to call off a war begun by a predecessor. No one would expect something so dramatic on the first day of a new administration but it remains a fact that the president is the commander in chief of the armed forces, and the power that allowed one president to invade Iraq would allow another to bring the troops home.
Thunder from Tibet
By Robert Barnett
Every so often, between the time a book leaves its publisher and the time it reaches its readers, events occur that change the ways it can be read. Such is the case with Pico Iyer's account of the fourteenth Dalai Lama, the exiled leader of Tibet. The eruption of major protests in March in the former mountain kingdom has rendered Iyer's gentle study of spirituality in the global age one that is less likely now to be seen as an inquiring portrait of a major thinker of our times than to be scanned for any sign of political prescience or treasured for the recollection of an innocence since lost. Few predicted the intensity of recent events inside Tibet, nor can anyone now be certain of their outcome.
The Rise of the Muslim Terrorists
By Malise Ruthven
What are the forces that drive young suicide bombers to commit mass murder? The question is addressed from different perspectives in nine books under review.
Giddy & Malevolent
By Francine Prose
With their intense, and intensely mixed, sympathies for the men and women who haunted the pubs and walked the streets of London's tawdrier districts just before, during, and after World War II, Patrick Hamilton's novels are dark tunnels of misery, loneliness, deceit, and sexual obsession, illuminated by scenes so funny that it takes a while to register the sheer awfulness of what we have just read.
Women Artists Win!
By Ingrid D. Rowland
On Bathers, Bodies, Beauty: The Visceral Eye by Linda Nochlin and WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, an exhibition at the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center.
Churchill and His Myths
By Geoffrey Wheatcroft
On Blood, Toil, Tears and Sweat: The Dire Warning by John Lukacs and three other books about Winston Churchill.
How to Cover an Election
By Frank Rich
When, in the summer of 1968, Norman Mailer covered the Republican and Democratic conventions on assignment for Harper's magazine, he was forty-five, an aging rebel looking for a new cause. He had started to drift restlessly from his single-minded pursuit of the Great American Novel into filmmaking and journalism, two callings that were also in the throes of seismic generational change.
Plus: Joseph Lelyveld on V.S. Naipaul, Larry McMurtry on the Comanches, Joyce Carol Oates on boxing, poems by Robin Robertson and Brad Leithauser, and more.
Volume 55, Number 8 · May 15, 2008
- The Nerve of Frida Kahlo by Sanford Schwartz
- The Truth About Putin and Medvedev by Amy Knight
- Displaced Passions by Sarah Kerr
- An Epic of the Everglades by Michael Dirda
- The Arab Spring, and After by Max Rodenbeck
- The Quest of Michel de Certeau by Natalie Zemon Davis
- The Financial Crisis: An Interview with George Soros by Judy Woodruff
- Plus: John Gross on the essays of John Updike, Kent Greenawalt on Martha Nussbaum's Liberty of Conscience, Peter Green on Herodotus, A.C. Grayling on Jane Goodall, poems by Derek Walcott and Charles Simic, and more.
Volume 55, Number 7 · May 1, 2008
- Two Speeches on Race by Garry Wills
- Into the Lion's Den by Hussein Agha and Robert Malley
- What Have We Learned, If Anything? by Tony Judt
- The Girl in the Tower by Alison Lurie
- Kashmir: The Scarred and the Beautiful by William Dalrymple
- In Priceland by Michael Chabon
- Youth! by Joyce Carol Oates
- The Case for Judas, Continued by Harold W. Attridge
- Plus: Frank Kermode on Ezra Pound, Ian Buruma on the battle for Japan, Tim Flannery on spiders, David Lodge on A. L. Kennedy, Caleb Crain on American snapshots, and more.
Volume 55, Number 6 · April 17, 2008
- Molehill Politics by Elizabeth Drew
- Forever Guantánamo by Raymond Bonner
- Gloomy About Globalization by Robert Skidelsky
- A Great American Visionary by Colm Tóibín
- Mistress Shakespeare by Stanley Wells
- The Rescue of John Steinbeck by Robert Gottlieb
- The Magical Painting of Poussin by Andrew Butterfield
- Plus: Michael Wood on Malcolm Lowry, Geoffrey O'Brien on Luc Sante, Peter Brown on Mosaics as History, Alexander Stille on crooks in Italy, William McNeill on genocide, and more.
