A Nation of Fliers examines the rise of aviation in Germany, from its beginnings through the eve of World War II, to illuminate the relationship between technology and culture during the Nazi period. It is not only an interesting book …
This has been a season of demented men. They flicker on the movie screen, igniting our emotions, and then leave us in darkness. Rarely do they touch the better parts of our nature. Mostly they engender fear and teach violence …
Daughter of a prominent Bolshevik intellectual, Anna Larina was twenty years old when she married the forty-five-year-old Bolshevik leader Nikolai Bukharin in 1935. As a little girl delighted by Bukharin’s playfulness and charm, she had looked forward to his visits …
President Clinton holds that pharmaceutical companies are overcharging patients for their medicines and that price controls are needed to stop the abuse. So far, it appears that Clinton may be more successful than Bush in bringing his own brand of …
Few things are less predictable than the vagaries of reputation. The role of Malcolm X in the racial dramas of the sixties was comparatively minor and his influence while alive, negligible. To have suggested in 1964 that within ten years …
After dark in Port-au-Prince the only people on the streets are the desperate, the vicious, and those with private cars. As my Haitian friend drove through the city center, he gave me a tour guide’s narration of the night sights. …
Reform of the nation’s primary system of cash aid to the poor—Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC)—is again on the political agenda. That this is happening so soon after the last wave of reform (which resulted in the Family …
Prognostications about media and society generally oscillate between two poles: to the north, one hears dithyrambs to a projected utopia offering fingertip access to all the information and images a citizen might need to enrich democracy and multiply freedom beyond …
Last September, while in Angola as an election observer, I met a young soldier in the Angolan army named Raul. Sporting green fatigues and an AK-47, he told me that he was on duty even though it was his birthday. …
What boggles the mind is not the pervasiveness of corruption in Italian society, but its thorough institutionalization. So when magistrates exposed the nature of the rot (their ongoing inquiry began in early 1992), perhaps no one should have been surprised …
In a perfect world, the media wizards who spawned Willie Horton would be out of business. But these propagandists are just one feature of a larger crisis of democratic capitalism: the interpenetration of politics, television, entertainment, and wealth. The mixture …
Margaret Thatcher managed to persuade the world at large, and conventional opinion in the United States, that her government had engineered the economic recovery and social transformation of Britain. That was a carefully contrived illusion, and for a while it …
Some fifteen years ago, in his book The Declining Significance of Race, the sociologist William Julius Wilson argued that the destruction of Jim Crow in the American South and the changes brought about by the civil rights movement had given …
There are many who will view Tony Judt’s Past Imperfect as a rearguard action. After all, the moral condemnation of French intellectuals for their utter credulity about communism in the late 1940s and the early 1950s is about as challenging …
When Michael Harrington’s The Other America began to win a large audience after its publication in 1962, both he and his friends were very much surprised. I remember thinking that Mike’s book, fine as it was, would probably be numbered …
