Supreme Court Schooling: The Little Rock, Arkansas, school desegregation crisis pitted nine African-American youths against Orval Faubus, the stubborn and deceitful Arkansas governor, and the thousands of white Little Rock citizens whose... Read More

In her classic 1965 essay, “The Imagination of Disaster,” Susan Sontag provided not only a taxonomy of the then newly emerging genre of science fiction films, but also described their philosophical foundations. She observed that the... Read More

“Herman Melville Crazy” was the assessment of a typical review of his Pierre: or, the Ambiguities, published in 1852, the year following the appearance of Moby-Dick. Other reviews were similarly devastating: “sound, fury, and... Read More

The post-Pill, pre-AIDS decade of 1974—1984 was uniquely rich in art and performance. Because most locations are gone, many artists displaced, much “product” lost to the public, and even the most arresting work and events slipping... Read More

Presidential Procession: The anecdotal journalistic accounts of presidential elections written by the late Theodore White, and Jack Germond, and Jules Witcover belong to an outmoded genre of political reporting. Their lengthy, personal... Read More

Has Kurt Vonnegut’s time come and gone? By the mid-1970s, after the successes of Cat’s Cradle and Slaughterhouse Five, Vonnegut was a major literary figure. No author of American fiction in that decade had more star power. While his... Read More

Few journalists observed more closely the dark side of American politics than this author. He remembers first-hand Jacqueline Kennedy’s grace following the murder of her husband; he was only a few feet away from Gerald Ford when an... Read More

First things first: this book is not really “about” the French Navy; in fact, it’s a full-dress history of the Seven Years War as a whole, from the French perspective. The title is not a complete misnomer, however, inasmuch as the... Read More