American Scholar back issues from January 2008:
Balancing acts.(Editor's Note)(Editorial)
Jan 01, 2008; ... As of yesterday, the president of Pakistan, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, had declared emergency rule and his rival, Benazir Bhutto, had urged her followers to take to the streets. The president of Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvili, had declared a state of emergency and sent out the riot police. The ...
Wonder bread.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
Jan 01, 2008; ... I assume that the writers condescended to by Melvin Jules Bukiet in "Wonder Bread" (Autumn 2007) are capable of defending themselves and their "Brooklyn Books of Wonder," though I would be willing to argue his point that "the only thing suffering teaches us is that we are capable of ...
Oops.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
Jan 01, 2008; ... I was stunned to find this in the Brooklyn writers piece: "disdain lays beneath the ...
Unto Caesar.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
Jan 01, 2008; ... I enjoyed Ethan Fishman's article in the Autumn 2007 issue. But he is wrong to blame only the Bush administration for policies that favor churches. The Democrats are also responsible. In 2006 Senators Barack Obama (D-Ill.) and Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) sponsored a law amending the Bankruptcy ...
The Trojan War.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
Jan 01, 2008; ... William Nichols in his essay "The Trojan War" does an excellent job of articulating the kind of irrational myopic thinking that may some day doom our planet. Nichols fails to consider the alternative to nuclear energy, which is to burn coal. Whereas nuclear energy presents risks, producing ...
Poetry Stand.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
Jan 01, 2008; ... Douglas Goetsch's "Poetry Stand," about precocious high school students writing poetry on demand for passersby, is one of the most charming pieces I've ever read in THE AMERICAN ...
Lady of the Lake.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
Jan 01, 2008; ... I was pleased to discover Alice Kaplan's article on Brenda Ueland in your Autumn issue and would like to add a brief addendum to the story. In 2002, when Brenda's daughter, Gabby, was in her 80s, she was moved to a nursing home. The manuscript of 0 Clouds, Unfold! was ...
Apologies all around.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
Jan 01, 2008; ... Most issues of the SCHOLAR have something of high interest for me, and every now and again, there's something I have to copy and keep. Every few years there's something so outstanding that I feel the need to write to you about it. So it is with Gorman Beauchamp's "Apologies All Around," ...
Death on the installment plan.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
Jan 01, 2008; ... A magazine that thinks of itself as intellectual devotes several thousand words to something as irrelevant as a group of pop musicians? The ...
Red-pen patriots.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
Jan 01, 2008; ... Larry J. Sabato's call for a Constitutional Convention ("Works in Progress") is fraught with danger. Once such a convention becomes a reality, it could put at risk the Constitution's most treasured provisions. The freedoms provided by the Bill of Rights could be a major target of those who ...
Atonality and beyond.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)
Jan 01, 2008; ... Sudip Bose in his review of The Rest Is Noise by Alex Ross contends that the history of Western music is a progression from tonality to atonality. There is no historical evidence for this. Western music was at its most atonal and dissonant, perhaps, during the 14th century. Many ...
Trapped in a golden age.(Letter from Vienna)
Jan 01, 2008; ... Fin-de-siecle Vienna may have flowered and faded more than a century ago, but the era remains a ubiquitous presence in the city today. Even if you do not visit the Belvedere Palace to see Gustav Klimt's The Kiss, simulacrums of that embrace will accost you from posters, notebook covers, ...
Works in progress.
Jan 01, 2008; ... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] BRIDGING THE BALKANS Built in the late 16th century, the Old Bridge in Mostar, Bosnia, was destroyed in 1993 during ethnic warfare. Its original stones, recovered from the Neretva River, were used in its reconstruction, which was completed four ...
Sign language: at their best, pictograms tell us clearly where to go and what to do; at their worst, things can get interesting.(Tuning Up)
Jan 01, 2008; ... Consider the pictogram. You have to, because pictograms are everywhere and often are your only guidance. Think of these elementary signs as a primitive art form sharing an ancestor with alphabets--hieroglyphs--but also as a sophisticated effort to overcome the Babel of tongues and ...
Who cares about executive supremacy? The scope of presidential power is the most urgent--and fundamentally ignored--legal and political issue of our time.(Exhortation)
Jan 01, 2008; ... For more than a generation, the Watergate-tapes case stood for the principle that the Supreme Court has the last word in defining the reach of presidential power: Richard Nixon claimed that his power was unlimited, especially when it came to national security, and that his position gave ...
Moral principle vs. military necessity: the first code of conduct during warfare, created by a Civil War-era Prussian immigrant, reflected ambiguities we struggle with to this day.('Lieber's Code')
Jan 01, 2008; ... During the hot and desperate summer of 1862, a senior American commander found himself consumed with the question of insurgents. Major General Henry Halleck had become general-in-chief of the Union armies in July of that year, and he soon discovered that the army had no laws or regulations ...
Dreaming of a Democratic Russia: memories of a year in Moscow promoting a post-Soviet political process, an undertaking that now seems futile.(Short story)
Jan 01, 2008; ... It's election season in Russia again. At least in theory. In reality, political competition has been replaced by the personage of Vladimir Putin. Russian politics appears more neo-Soviet with each passing day--as minions applaud the advancement of a mystery candidate to replace Putin as ...
Politics.(TWO POEMS)(Poem)
Jan 01, 2008; ... <Pre> Politics According to Aristotle,it's the nature of natureto do nothing uselesslyand the nature of desirenot to be satisfied, so after the election,narrowest nail biteror humiliating landslide,why stew and fume? If Aristotle's ...
Under the Auspices.(TWO POEMS)(Poem)
Jan 01, 2008; ... <Pre> Under the Auspices Five common crows harassing a hawk,broad-winged red-tail coasting updraftsabove a field of cedar cutand piled high for winter burning, drive him to evasive action,sudden nosedives, steep chandelles,loop the loops to lose a ...
The Long Hall.(Poem)
Jan 01, 2008; ... <Pre> The Long Hall The past goes down and disappears,The present stumbles home to bed,The future stretches out in yearsThat no one knows, and you'll be dead.--Weldon Kees, "The Speakers" Working inward, years are hard to reachas an itching ...
Windy Ode.(Poem)
Jan 01, 2008; ... <Pre> Windy Ode Wind, you haven't changed. Rememberthat desert town you did your best to level? Trapped in a classroom, I triedto fashion a W that didn't wobble, one that would puff its sails and crossthe blank page of the penmanship book. Beyond ...
The daily miracle: life with the mavericks and oddballs at the Herald Tribune.(Short story)
Jan 01, 2008; ... I did my first writing as an adult in North Africa and Italy during World War II. That's where I learned that writers can write anywhere. As a boy I had taught myself to type because I wanted to grow up to be a newspaperman, preferably on the New York Herald Tribune, the paper I idolized ...
Cuss time: by limiting freedom of expression, we take away thoughts and ideas before they have the opportunity to hatch.(Short story)
Jan 01, 2008; ... My dad often told a story from his days as a mail carrier where he confronted a little boy no more than five perched up in a tree in a yard severely marked by poverty and neglect. The kid looked down with dirty face and clothes and said, "Whatcha want, you old son of a bitch?" We laughed ...
Alone at the movies: my days in the dark with Robert Altman and Woody Allen.(Short story)
Jan 01, 2008; ... For a year or two during the mid-1970s, living in New York, I was a moviegoer. I was in my early 20s then, working off and on, driving a cab, setting up the stage at rock shows, writing occasional pieces for The Village Voice. But there were also long empty spells. I tried to write some ...
Balanchine's cabinet: a young woman wins a drawing and learns to give and to receive.(Short story)
Jan 01, 2008; ... My fingertips run over the cabinet's coffee bean-colored finish. The carvings--gods, devils, and angels dancing along the edge in high relief--suggest a Hieronymus Bosch painting. My hand stops before reaching the cabinet's center, the spot where the finish has worn off the mahogany. His ...
Confluences: as a beloved uncle makes his final journey in the wilderness, a new life begins.(Short story)
Jan 01, 2008; ... (for my father) For the first 12 hours after my father returned--wearing clothes that were three days old, his body still wrinkled from time spent immersed in water--he faced investigation for the murder of his brother. I imagine it was only protocol for the rangers and the ...
The Leap.(Fiction)(Short story)
Jan 01, 2008; ... Going upstairs near midnight, the house below her now dark, the thought came to her that afterwards she would be alone at night. This house would be empty around her, and she would be alone, too, in the apartment, in the city. Anne had gone downstairs to turn off the kitchen ...
Moonbow.(Fiction)(Short story)
Jan 01, 2008; ... People are getting away with murder, but I can't get away with having a glass of water in bed. I trade sides with my dog, who won't feel what I spilled anyway. From this side of the bed, I see the moon through the window. It's a full moon with ... something extra. I've heard ...
On the road to nowhere: Tom Stoppard's Russian intellectuals take a wrong turn with Hegel, just as Edmund Wilson once did with Marx.(Theater)
Jan 01, 2008; ... When a playwright uses the stage to dramatize the past, the audience can only be expected to be moved more by theatrical effects than by historical depth. Tom Stoppard's trilogy, The Coast of Utopia, which follows a group of Russian intellectuals through three decades of the 19th century ...
The quiet sideman: tenor saxist 'Chu' Berry emerged from the pack at the end of his short life.(Jazz)(Biography)
Jan 01, 2008; ... Near the end of his eight years as a recording-session musician, tenor saxophonist Leon "Chu" Berry landed a short-lived spot with Count Basie's orchestra. Standing in for one of the Basle band's two tenor giants, Herschel Evans, who had developed a heart ailment, Berry took a lead solo on ...
Souls hungering after meaning: in Aegypt, John Crowley's just-completed four-book masterwork, ordinary people bear a faint symbolic glow through real and mythological realms.(Essay)
Jan 01, 2008; ... Books Considered in This Essay AEGYPT By John Crowley Bantam, 1987 reissued as THE SOLITUDES Overlook Press | $15.95 LOVE & SLEEP Bantam, 1994 DAEMONOMANIA Bantam, 2000 ENDLESS THINGS Small Beer Press, 2007 ...
The work of death: how the Civil War changed forever Americans' relationship with mortality.(The Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War)(Book review)
Jan 01, 2008; ... THIS REPUBLIC OF SUFFERING: death and the American Civil War By Drew Gilpin Faust Knopf | $27.95 On the afternoon of July 3, 1863, my great-grandfather, Robert Ferguson of the 53rd Virginia, and my great-great-grandfather, Thomas Upchurch of the 7th North Carolina, along with ...
Subjectivity is all: using a lifetime of colorful examples to define the undefinable.(Book review)
Jan 01, 2008; ... MODERNISM The Lure of Heresy from Baudelaire to Beckett and Beyond By Peter Gay Norton | $35 The difficulty of summing up the meaning of the word modernism has always been exemplified for me by the following paradox. T. S. Eliot's The Wasteland of 1922 is, largely, a pastiche of ...
The casserole inquisition: chronicles from America's culinary transformation.(Excerpt)
Jan 01, 2008; ... THE TENTH MUSE My Life in Food By Judith Jones Knopf | $24.95 The time: 1955. The place: the dining room of Balch II, a women s dormitory at Cornell University. Ten of us are at one of the big round tables where the art of gracious living is inculcated in us during ...
Wry eye on the bard: sorting through the little we know about the best we've got.(Book review)
Jan 01, 2008; ... SHAKESPEARE The World as Stage By Bill Bryson Harper Collins, Atlas Books | $19.95 For those who admire Bill Bryson, an Iowa-bred humorist whose home base has alternated between England and New England since 1973 (but who has also enjoyed productive sojourns to Africa, ...
Latin's eminent career: is the language of empire, the church, scholarship, and Europe nearing retirement?(Ad Infinitum: A Biography of Latin)(Book review)
Jan 01, 2008; ... AD INFINITUM A Biography of Latin By Nicholas Ostler Walker | $27.95 Latin, like contemporary poetry, is subject to a certain amount of boosterism. True, there is no National Latin Month or Latin Teacher Laureate, but anyone with an interest in Latin is likely to have an ...
A long walk in the new world: of 300 settlers sent by Spain to Florida, only four survived.(A Land So Strange: The Epic Journey of Cabeza de Vaca)(Book review)
Jan 01, 2008; ... A LAND SO STRANGE The Epic Journey of Cabeza de Vaca By Andres Resendez Basic Books | $26.95 A generation after Columbus landed in the New World, a party set off from Seville to claim a vast strip of North America stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific, including ...
Correction.(Correction notice)
Jan 01, 2008 ... A review in the Autumn 2007 issue of the book Musicophilia by Oliver Sacks ...
Gratitude.(COMMONPLACE BOOK)(Excerpt)
Jan 01, 2008; ... When the atom bombs were dropped ... when we learned to our astonishment that we would not be obliged in a few months to rush up the beaches near Tokyo assault-firing while being machine-gunned, mortared, and shelled, for all the practiced phlegm of our tough facades we broke down and ...
For Jacques Barzun on his centennial.(Findings)(Brief article)
Jan 01, 2008 ... The test and the use of man's education is that he finds pleasure in the exercise of his mind.--JACQUES BARZUN We salute Professor Barzun on his birthday for his many contributions to American education, scholarship, and letters. His connection to Columbia University, where he ...