Gambling, Debt, and Literary Fortune
Dostoevsky lost everything at the Wiesbaden casino, but the episode seemed to finally reveal to him the true depth of his habit, that it threatened not only his marriage but the life of his wife.
The Best Books on the American Revolution
Nash’s achievement is not merely to show the “underside” or “history from the bottom up,” but to show how the ideas of the Revolution motivated men and women across the economic spectrum.
The Greatest Judge in American History?
The Supreme Court was Marshall’s vehicle for instituting the Federalist vision of government even after the Federalist Party had perished. Marshall strengthened the Supreme Court, which previously had the appearance of triviality.
Scholarship, Truth, and Islam
What Bevilacqua describes as “the Republic of Arabic letters” was the emergence during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries of a number of European scholars who, although Christian, championed Islam as a worthwhile subject of investigation.
The Conscience of an Immigrant American Conservative
If we face the prospect of a civil war prompted by immigration, you don’t finish this book imagining its imminence. There is ample reason, however, to create a new national approach to international migration to the United States.
An Administrative Life
Gray remarks in her preface, “I began my training for the academic profession at a time now wistfully (and somewhat mistakenly) called a golden age, and retired in what may eventually be deemed an age of bronze.”
To Whom Does Music Belong?
Like Karen Carpenter, Lhasa de Sela and her family pursued an American vision of success, even if Lhasa’s story was more invested in the pursuit of personal fulfillment than of normalcy.
The (Syn)Aesthetics of Conspiracy
Since con-spiracies, imagined or true, (etymologically) presuppose the ‘breathing together’ of their wicked wire-pullers, it does not surprise that the artistic response is to picture or craft toxic togetherness, outrageous overlaps and acid amalgamations.
Binaries, Buddhism and the Art of Reminders in the Work of Jacob Hashimoto
In one sense, there is something straightforward about what Hashimoto does with his materials and the visions he produces. What you see is what you get: translucent geometric solids that aggregate into a meandering whole.
The Resurrection of a Language and the Language of Resurrection
Lewis Glinert observes that “an Israeli teenager today can open a three-thousand-year-old chapter of biblical prose and understand it almost unaided… By contrast, no English speaker today could open a one-thousand-year-old ‘English’ text and make sense of it unaided; it’s another tongue.”
Interwoven Fates: 20th-Century German History and the European Refugee Crisis
Erpenbeck’s language is measured and restrained, devoid of preachiness; she writes primarily in the present tense, leading her readers to comprehend the complexities of history and fate, without succumbing to emotion.
The Americans and the Nazis: Who Copied Whom?
The sources make clear that two distinct strands of American law, the second class (Jim Crow) citizenship imposed on African-Americans in the South and the exclusionary rules applied to nonwhites in American immigration law, were known to the Germans and directly influenced the drafting process.
Originalism Then and Now
Neither recourse to illusory historical specificity, nor ex cathedra decrees from five of nine Justices, can in the long run substitute for self-governing citizens and legislators who accept the responsibility of deliberating and compromising with one another.
Treasures Better Hid: The Making of Our High-Energy World
By the early nineteenth century, the power potential of the pre-industrial world was just about maxed out. It was a world powered by animal muscles, windmills, and water wheels. And it was a wood-powered world with rapidly disappearing forests.
Epistolary Exposure, Embodied Critique, and American Identity: On Bruce Springsteen’s “The Hitter”
One of the ingenious choices on Nebraska is the recurrent trope of the songs’ narrators deferentially or defensively inserting the word “sir” into their issuances of direct address. This is inverted in “The Hitter” where the address is epistolary, a man writing to his mother with the recurrence coming in repeated uses of the word “Ma.”
A Small Revolution Within a Larger One
Toews’s brave humor, which has added grace and depth to such weighty topics as suicide in the past, is still present, chiefly in the irony of a male narrator, August Epps, who must take notes on the women’s meeting because they are unable to read and write, having lived in a religious community that does not allow them to.
