American Scholar articles from January 1997

American Scholar archives from January 1997

What's in it for the talent? (differentiating the talented from the genius)
January 1, 1997... Of the various kinds of snob I undoubtedly am, it is as a talent snob that I wish above all to be known and, I hope, remembered. People who have real ability, who can do dashingly what most people cannot do at all, have my number. The kinds of...

The Kevorkian epidemic. (the insanity of euthanasia)
January 1, 1997... De. Jack Kevorkian of Detroit has been in the papers most days this past summer and autumn helping sick people kill themselves. He is said to receive hundreds of calls a week. Although his acts are illegal by statute and common law in...

December days. (poem)
January 1, 1997... Things work: the days grow cold, buildings rise up and collapse, lust seems a memory, then it returns. Oh well, the day's yours--why not make a small mess, a puddle of contrition somewhere? Even birds stumble...

Requiem for Judith Resnick. (poem)
January 1, 1997... The world looks great. --Judith Resnick from the space shuttle Discovery, 1984 Sometimes as though you were hovering, as though you wished someone--anyone to remember, I see you, a young girl polishing...

The merely very good. (Paul A.M. Dirac is to Robert Oppenheimer, as W.H. Auden is to Stephen Spender or genius before talent)
January 1, 1997... Early in 1981 I received an invitation to give a lecture at a writer's conference that was being held someplace on the Delaware River in Pennsylvania, just across from New Jersey. I don't remember the exact location, but a study of the map...

Liberty print. (poem)
January 1, 1997... Under the abiding lamp, appearances and disappearances; the needle shines: up through the billow of pale hydrangea, back down into daphne, small strawberry blossoms, beneath the fragile green. This fine cotton is...

The river and the road: fashions in forgiveness.
January 1, 1997... When Lionel Trilling collected the essays that became The Liberal Imagination, was it chance or subliminal recognition of affinity that caused him to place his discussions of Huckleberry Finn and of Kipling side by side? Five years separated...

Haggin. (music critic Bernard H. Haggin)
January 1, 1997... I I don't now remember how I first heard of B. H. Haggin's music criticism or when I started to read it, but it must have been about 1952, during my junior or senior year at college. I was majoring in English at Amherst, under teachers...

Last love. (poem)
January 1, 1997... When he covers her hand which is lying On her lap with his large, heavy hand And feels his body leaning toward her On the bench in the nursing home garden, He feels he is protecting her with his Entire being that can...

Who was Leo Strauss?(Political Philosophy)
January 1, 1997... More than twenty years after his death, Leo Strauss remains an enigmatic and controversial figure. Commentators, both friendly and hostile, have variously found the pivot point of Strauss's thought in a desired return to Greek thought--in some...

When did modern science begin?
January 1, 1997... Although science has a long history with roots in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, it is indisputable that modern science emerged in Western Europe and nowhere else. The reasons for this momentous occurrence must, therefore, be sought in some...

I've cultivated a nostalgia. (poem)
January 1, 1997... I've cultivated a nostalgia so frugal it re-lives the death of communism without party favors or vodka, your embryo taking root and Ceausescu executed within hours of each other on a Christmas morning five years down...

Remembering Odessa. (poem)
January 1, 1997... Father knew six languages and sold sewing machines in Odessa. Before I was a schoolgirl, I could read in three. I remember the yellow hair of my mother, that matched the wands of wheat in picture books. ...

The jilted clairvoyant. (poem)
January 1, 1997... If, when you look at your hand, the first thing you think of is "wave," you are destined to say good-bye to everything you love, hello to the horizon. If you think "grip" or "hold," your hated will turn a wheel...

Rondeau: old woman with a cat. (poem)
January 1, 1997... Osteoporosis (one of life's indignities) is such a splendid name for the disease-- all those little o's, holes in the bone where the rain gets in, rendering a crone like me defective, porous, as Swiss cheese. I'm...

Parents vs. state. (governmental policies and the family)
January 1, 1997... In the Times Literary Supplement, John Tyler Bonner, a biology professor at Princeton, described the fundamental changes he had lived through in his long professional career. In the early decades of this century, evolutionary biologists took...

The Life of Graham Greene, vol. 1, 1904-1939.
January 1, 1997... By Norman Sherry. Volume 1: 1904-1939. Penguin. Paper, $18.95. Volume 2: 1939-1955. Viking. $34.95 Graham Greene, one of the most accomplished English novelists of the twentieth century, whose vast oeuvre has been translated into forty...

Graham Greene: The Enemy Within.
January 1, 1997... By Michael Shelden. Random House. $27.50 Graham Greene, one of the most accomplished English novelists of the twentieth century, whose vast oeuvre has been translated into forty languages, died in 1991 at the age of eighty-six, and already...

Graham Greene: Three Lives.
January 1, 1997... By Anthony Mockler. Hunter MacCay. 14.95 [pounds sterling]. Graham Greene, one of the most accomplished English novelists of the twentieth century, whose vast oeuvre has been translated into forty languages, died in 1991 at the age of...

Graham Greene: Friend and Brother.
January 1, 1997... By Leopoldo Durano. HarperCollins. $24. Graham Greene, one of the most accomplished English novelists of the twentieth century, whose vast oeuvre has been translated into forty languages, died in 1991 at the age of eighty-six, and already...

Late Bloomers.
January 1, 1997... By Brendan Gill. Artisan. $14. 95. This little book is as charming in look and feel as in content. Barely five and a half by seven inches, it is slightly larger than the common paperback and a little heavier, though not as thick. The front...

The Lincoln Persuasion: Remaking American Liberalism.
January 1, 1997... By J. David Greenstone. Princeton University Press. $24. 95. Paper, $13.95. Reviewed by Charles L. Griswold, Jr. The American Founding was to an extraordinary extent the undertaking of classically educated and philosophically informed...

T.S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and Literary Form.
January 1, 1997... By Anthony Julius. Cambridge University Press. $49.95. Reviewed by Evelyn Toynton On hearing that someone has written a book on the anti-Semitism of T. S. Eliot, one may be tempted to respond with a groan. We've already seen Mark Twain...

Mists of Regret: Culture and Sensibility in Classic French Film.
January 1, 1997... By Dudley Andrew. Princeton University Press. Paper, $24.95. Reviewed by Robin Bates The poetic realist films of the late 1930s are indelibly marked on the French mind. The famous shot from Marcel Carne's Quai des Brumes (1938)--of Jean...

We Scholars: Changing the Culture of the University.
January 1, 1997... By David Damrosch. Harvard University Press. $32. 50. Paper, $15.95. Reviewed by Robert B. Heilman The author, who professes literature at Columbia, is annoyed by various procedures and styles of the Metropolitan Ivy, and in venting his...

The Manuscript Found in Saragossa.
January 1, 1997... By Jan Potocki. Translated by lan Maclean. Viking. $27. 95. Reviewed by Jonathan Elukin When Jan Potocki shot himself in 1815--whether out of boredom or madness is unclear--the learned Polish nobleman ended a lifetime of travel, erudition,...

The Renaissance of Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany.
January 1, 1997... By Michael Brenner. Yale University Press. $30. Reviewed by Ruth Gay No phase of German history has been more closely studied than the fourteen years of the Weimar Republic, as we turn the events over and over seeking clues to the...