This year that is fast disappearing will not be remembered in these quarters with very much warmth. It was a fairly hideous, sickening year, the year that I felt I got old. But like all good things, the bad ones come to an end as well, and thanks to some much appreciated end of the …
On this, the 150th anniversary of the battle of Antietam, which, thank God, has not yet been replaced as the bloodiest day in American history, please allow me to recommend a new history of the battle, Richard Slotkin‘s The Long Road to Antietam. As the title suggests, the book is about much more than the …
. . .so far, anyway, has appeared in The American Conservative. It is called “Revolt of the Rich,”and it is by by Mike Lofgren, who spent 16 years as a Republican staffer on House and Senate Budget Committees. In the article, he makes a case that very few other Republicans are willing to advocate: not …
(First published in The Washington Monthly) Killing the Poormaster, the new book by Holly Metz, brings vividly to life 1930s Hoboken, New Jersey, making it easy to envision classic brownstones with street vendors, milk trucks, and boys in knickers in the same neighborhoods now filled with stockbrokers and hipsters. The book’s great achievement, however, is …
(first published in The American Prospect) The venerable publishing house Scribner recently published a new edition of Ernest Hemingway’s classic novel A Farewell to Arms, complete with all the many endings the author rejected. “I rewrote the ending of Farewell to Arms, the last page of it, 39 times before I was satisfied”, he told …
Gore Vidal, the eminent man of letters, died last week at 86. In the splendid obituary that appeared in The New York Times, Charles McGrath wrote “ Mr. Vidal was, at the end of his life, an Augustan figure who believed himself to be the last of a breed, and he was probably right. Few …
This post was originally published on nymag.com. Click here to read it. The economist Niall Ferguson had a piece in Newsweek the other day entitled “The Cure for Our Economy’s Stationary State.” As in his most recent book, the Harvard historian pointed out that the economies of the United States and Europe have lost their …
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I met the great Nora Ephron just about 30 years ago, when I was a young junior executive in the great John Scanlon‘s public relations agency. We had been hired to work on the film Silkwood, in part through Nora, who was one of John’s Hamptons friends. I really didn’t have anything to do with …
It is a hard job being a sequel, but it is nearly an impossible task to be the second book of a trilogy. The first book gets all the benefit of the first blush of a love affair between the subject and the reader, and the third cashes in on the great drama of the …
There’s a very nice article about me and the Disunion blog in the Spring issue of LaSalle magazine, the alumni publication of my alma mater. Thanks to Jeremy Rosen for a very complimentary piece.