Books and Arts
Plottings, Real and Otherwise
Radical political figures attract film-makers. Those figures seem the available equivalents of saints or idealistic heroes; and since a good number of them ended badly they have some of the aura of tragedy. But in most cases such figures are cinematic snares--not because of the character or the heroism, but because of the politics. Warren Beatty's Reds (1981) is the best film he has made, but it never became much more complex than a biography of John Reed's love life against a revolutionary background. READ MORE >>
Heredity and Humanity
Forty-eight years ago, James Watson and Francis Crick introduced DNA's elegant double helix to the world in the pages of Nature. With extravagant understatement, they began their report by noting that DNA's "structure has novel features which are of considerable biological interest." Four months ago, with the publication of the sequence and the analysis of the human genome, scientists offered further evidence of just how considerable. READ MORE >>
Less Than Zero
Idiocy has a time-honored link to illumination. “The prophet is a fool,” warned Hosea, “the spiritual man is mad.” The uninhibited man (I mean the really uninhibited man), the man who is not governed by norms and manners, the ridiculous man, the tasteless man, the obscene man, the man who does not think reasonably and realistically, the man who never stops laughing: The figure has taken many forms, and one of them is the meshuggene. Civilization makes craziness look like a variety of courage, of intellectual elevation. READ MORE >>
The Ghost Rutter
The Dying Animal by Philip Roth (Houghton Mifflin, 156 pp., $23) READ MORE >>
Why Literature?
Tablets to Books
Libraries in the Ancient World By Lionel Casson (Yale University Press, 177 pp., $22.95) READ MORE >>
Homo Scriblerus
Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books by H.J. Jackson (Yale University Press, 324 pp., $27.95) READ MORE >>
Slaughterhouse Jive
Introduction to Animal Rights Your Child or the Dog?by Gary L. Francione(Temple University Press, 328 pp., $69.50) READ MORE >>
Carvin' the Bird
Girlie, Interrupted
American Feminism, Still vigorous in its latest run of thirty years, is also old enough to produce its own vexed family dynamics. In the political unconscious of the women's movement, the mothers, beset by anxieties about age and the fate of their boldest dreams, fret at their offspring's backsliding ways. And the young bridle at the old guard's faith that a politics devised thirty years ago retains its potency today. READ MORE >>
