A biographer has a difficult task. If a person has reached a position interesting enough to warrant a biography, then he or she has surely created a persona that has been as... Read More

“I am having a hideous time here. I feel like Saint Sebastian, stuck full of arrows that people are firing at me,” wrote Abbott Lawrence Lowell, president of Harvard, in... Read More

Television is more than fifty years old. It is tempting to say that the medium is mature, that its strengths and limitations are understood. The problem with this viewpoint is... Read More

This book belongs to an earlier generation of literary criticism, one that is too often undervalued today. The author takes as her intellectual foundation that “writers’... Read More

Young Bertie Canfield wrote in his diary that although he thought his new home in Kansas looked “very funnie” because the landscape had no fences, he was nonetheless... Read More

Parents complain about it every day: today’s kids are growing up faster than ever, with grade-school girls dressing like Britney Spears and boys joining gangs before their age... Read More

There is an undercurrent of emotion running through all the contributions to this work on sexual liberation, but it isn’t enthusiasm for the subject or even optimism for the... Read More

In Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel’s Night, he writes of sharing the same concentration camp barracks with his father and watching him as he’s beaten and broken “like a dry... Read More

“How do you know I am a ‘good American?’” Macdonald demands of a British editor who has thusly praised him. Hardly the reaction one would expect, but perfectly in... Read More