Books/Culture Keyword

AS SOCIAL critics, writers, editors, and scholars, intellectuals have a responsibility to be both a part of and apart from the society in which they live. E. J. Dionne, Jr., Alice Kessler-Harris, Jackson Lears, Martha Nussbaum, Katha Pollitt, Michael Tomasky, Katrina vanden Heuvel, and Leon Wieseltier contemplate the role intellectuals ought to play in American political and cultural life.

WERNER SOMBART'S hundred-year-old question about American politics--why does America not have a socialist movement?--has not only faded in the last couple of decades; it has been inverted. The question for contemporary historians, writes Michael Kimmage, is why does America have so much capitalism? (Reagan in a 1981 televised address / White House / Wikimedia)

ANDREAS KALYVAS and Ira Katznelson's Liberal Beginnings captures not only the story of liberalism's emergence from republicanism but, writes Geoffrey Kurtz, also provides "a model for understanding how social democracy [developed] from liberalism." (Adam Smith and Eduard Bernstein)

IN SNOW, Orhan Pamuk creates a drama of modern life in the process of moving toward radical polarization. "There are two radically different roads people can take," writes Marshall Berman. "They may reach out toward the most open and generous inclusiveness...Or else they may plunge into the most rigid and violent exclusions." (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

A NOVELIST, essayist, and poet, John Updike "exemplified the disappearing figure of the man of letters," writes Morris Dickstein." Considering his last poems, Nicolaus Mills adds, "How lovely to find in Updike a writer so worthy of personal admiration! How often does any writer offer us such a gift?" (Photo courtesy of Alfred A. Knopf)

AN INDEPENDENT mind, George Lichtheim was "the real thing, not the self-announced sort," writes Mitchell Cohen. "His histories of socialism and Marxism are among the most intelligent that we have....Even if you would dispute him on something or many things, you'll feel smarter for the disagreement." (Illustration: William Allen Rogers cartoon from Harper's Weekly, September 15, 1900, Scanned by Bob Burkhardt / Wikimedia Commons)

RESTRAINED AND often allegorical, J.M. Coetzee's novels have come under frequent criticism for their political ambivalence. But, writes David Marcus, "Coetzee does not doubt the ability to resist evil....[He] believes that the most successful means of opposition comes through more critical methods...the slow, skeptical dissolution of power and ideas." (Photo: The reluctant anarchist: J.M. Coetzee, Bert Neinhuis / Viking)

CHARLES TAYLOR'S A Secular Age offers an invaluable map of how the modern religious-secular divide came into being, writes Andrew Koppelman."Modern secularism [in Taylor's account] is a religious worldview, with its own narrative of testing and redemption.

KNOWN FOR her cerebral essays and supreme self-assurance, Susan Sontag was also "inflammably sensual," writes Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow. "For Sontag, there was an intimate link between work and sexuality....[Her] knowledge of the possibilities of the body...opened up all of life for her." (Photo: From the cover of Sontag’s first installment of journals, Reborn, FSG)

NOVELIST JOHN Updike passed away last week at the age of 76. Writes Morris Dickstein, "He exemplified the disappearing figure of the man of letters...a writer who could turn the most fugitive of impressions...into language that uncannily enabled you to see and feel it." (Photo: Martha Updike, courtesy of Knopf)

WHILE THE expansion of presidential power reached a troubling climax under Bush, Sanford Levinson argues that the failure can be traced to the inadequacies of our political system--one "in which politically self-interested party leaders...have an incentive to declare emergencies--and to take on quasi-dictatorial powers." (George W. Bush after his 2004 election / White House / Wikimedia)

IN PUTIN'S Russia, many intellectuals have turned toward a new emotionalism--one that has "rejected the worst aspects of postmodernism," writes Kirill Medvedev. "But it has also rejected its undeniably positive qualities: its irrepressible critical outlook and its intellectual sophistication." (Photo: Mikhail Evstafiev/ Creative Commons)

SURVEYING THE recent wave of "literary" science fiction, Benjamin Kunkel concludes that "when the contemporary novelist contemplates the future...he or she often...responds to political problems by rejecting politics for personal life....The result is political novels without politics." (Image: From the cover of Matthew Sharpe's Jamestown / Soft Skull Press)

UNTIL RECENTLY, many intellectuals on the left have suffered from "a fatal aversion to moral prescription." Reviewing Susan Neiman's Moral Clarity and Rob Riemen's The Nobility of Spirit, Richard Wolin explores two new arguments for a return to the moral and humanistic values of the past.

SINCE ABU Ghraib, torture has undermined both the U.S.'s war effort in Iraq and its public image as a bastion of liberal democracy. But, according to Gary Bass, democratic torture is regrettably common. "Democracies torture," he writes in his review of Darius Rejali's Torture and Democracy. "They just do it evasively."

OVER THE past three years there has been a steady output of Iraq War films--Home of the Brave (2006), In the Valley of Elah (2007), Redacted (2007), Grace Is Gone (2007), A Mighty Heart (2007), Badland (2007). "What is most striking about many of [these] current films," writes Jeanie Elenor Gosline, "is their reliance on characterizations we've seen before-in The Deer Hunter and Coming Home, and also in Taxi Driver."

"MANY LABOR scholars find the concept of a 'postwar social contract' a little light in the socks, too intangible to be useful and too optimistic about the potential of capitalism to be desirable. Not Steve Greenhouse," writes Jack Metzgar in a review of Greenhouse's The Big Squeeze and David Kusnet's Love the Work, Hate the Job.

THE WIRE was a huge hit among critics. But was the show's gritty depiction of Baltimore urban life too bleak and hopeless? John Atlas and Peter Dreier argue with Anmol Chaddha, Sudhir Venkatesh, and William Julius Wilson. (Photo: Paul Schiraldi, courtesy of HBO)

PHILIP GLASS'S Satyagraha is a four-hours-long, Sanskrit-sung opera dedicated to Gandhi and his philosophy of nonviolent resistance. "Glass's opera gives us a noble man and gallant struggles," writes Mitchell Cohen, "even if one feature of it--the beautifully imagined insistence that Gandhi's teachings and tactics are universal[...]--makes Gandhi's own mistake." (Photo: Ken Howard, courtesy of Metropolitan Opera)

ATLANTIC YARDS is the largest project Frank Gehry, now seventy-eight, has ever undertaken. And if it proves to be his last large project, it will be a fitting capstone to a career utterly blind to the public, writes Charles Taylor. (Photo: Dinopup / Wikicommons)