The New Republic

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Libraries in the Ancient World By Lionel Casson  (Yale University Press, 177 pp., $22.95) READ MORE >>

It is the year 2019. In the heart of downtown Los Angeles, massive electronic billboards feature a model in a kimono hawking products labeled in Japanese. In the streets below, figures clad in traditional East Asian peasant garb hurry by, speaking to each other in an English made unrecognizable by the addition of hundreds of Spanish and Asian words. A rough-mannered policeman leaves an incongruously graceful calling card on a doorstep: a delicate origami paper sculpture. READ MORE >>

DURING the past 25 years billions of dollars of the taxpayers' money have been appropriated, under false pretenses, by the shipping industry. The story of this looting of the federal Treasury, as it unfolds in volume after volume of the Congressional Record, is a study in twentieth-century piracy that reduces Captain Kidd, Bluebeard and other bravos of the Spanish Main to the stature of mischievous schoolboys. READ MORE >>

In the mass of replies and counter-attacks written to answer Benjamin Stolberg’s “Inside the CIO” there has been one significant omission. The pamphlet, as everyone knows, was serialized in the Scripps-Howard papers in January, in twelve installments. As its main point was that Communists were in control of many CIO unions and were disrupting others, and as it appeared while the CIO was being attacked as Communist in New Jersey and elsewhere, it has provoked answers out of proportion to its importance as a piece of labor journalism. READ MORE >>