The Critic’s Handbook to Pontificating About Everything offers no guidance on how to assess the quality of an opera libretto that’s written in the form of a mystery novel—which is precisely what "Quicksand" announces itself to be.... Read More

Day-to-day existence confronts humanity with a phalanx of perils—wars, plagues, floods, droughts, earthquakes, economic upheavals. The list is as endless as human fears. In this breezily written study, Ruiz, who teaches history,... Read More

These are transcriptions of fifty interviews Moyers conducted for the third incarnation of Bill Moyers Journal, which ran on PBS from 2007 to 2010. Politically, he is an unapologetic New Deal/Great Society liberal (he was Lyndon... Read More

Like it or not, Noam Chomsky is America’s conscience. His indignant voice cuts through all the official “patriotic” babble to lay bare actual causes and effects in this country’s political policies, both foreign and domestic. It... Read More

The end David Marquand speaks of here is not a doomsday scenario in which the rising tide that is China and India washes away Europe and America. Rather, it is about the end of Western smugness and dominance—of the notion that the West... Read More

The setting is perfect for murder: a rickety old hotel—the Black Swan—on upscale Fishers Island, a tiny speck of land off the coast of Long Island; a dysfunctional family of high-tech refugees running the hotel; and an impending... Read More

Every painting of cultural worth should have a chronicler as thorough and comprehensive as James M. Dennis. A professor emeritus of art history at the University of Wisconsin, Dennis has two missions here, the first being to explain the... Read More

America may be forgiven for not knowing that Benjamin Albert Botkin (1901–1975) was its folklorist, since Botkin’s greatest popular impact occurred in the 1930s and 1940s, arguably peaking in 1944 with the publication of his... Read More