American Scholar articles from January 1999

American Scholar archives from January 1999

AT LARGE AND AT SMALL.(synchronization of circadian rhythms)
January 1, 1999... Night Owl My husband and I sleep in a white wooden bed whose head posts are surmounted by two birds, carved and painted by an artist friend. On George's side there is a meadowlark, brown of back, yellow of breast, with a black pectoral V...

How We Dress.
January 1, 1999... He that is to be hanged, or otherwise executed, first takes care to get himself shaved, and handsomely dressed, either in mourning or in the dress of a bridegroom; this done, he sets his friends at work to get him leave to be buried, and to...

I "I'm Interested in Everything!".(man of letters Alfred Kazin)
January 1, 1999... The death of Alfred Kazin not only deprives us of our greatest living man of letters, someone who wrote about literature with zest and style almost until the day he died, but also robs me of a friend I'd come to see as a kind of godfather in...

II The Burning Soul.(Jewish intellectual Charley Kazin)(Brief Article)
January 1, 1999... I have been talking about my father all my life: his awkwardness with young children, his limitless passion for words, his rages (sensible and not so sensible), his fierce love of justice, his luminous hatred for pretense and pomposity, his...

III Alfred Kazin's Tie.
January 1, 1999... One of Alfred Kazin's ties is in my closet. It was given to me the night that Alfred died. His wife, Judith, came out of the bedroom with ties hanging like vines from her hand. "Take one," she urged. There were some old woolen ties there,...

IV Listening to the Sea.(critic Alfred Kazin)(Brief Article)
January 1, 1999... As a critic, Alfred Kazin was impossible to place in any of the conventional categories. He owed allegiance to none of the intellectual factions that rose and fell (and sometimes rose again, under different names) during his long career. He...

V My Fellow American.(Alfred Kazin)(Brief Article)
January 1, 1999... I had never heard of Alfred Kazin (imagine!) until three years ago, on a flight from Paris to New York. The cabin doors were swinging shut when a woman in her late fifties homed in on the empty seat--and potential nap space--beside me. I...

VI Notes from Mrs. K.(Alfred Kazin)
January 1, 1999... I first "met" Alfred Kazin about twenty years before he met me. A senior at Mount Holyoke, I had read him for years in the Reporter and everywhere else and was sitting right in the front row, pupils fully dilated, when he came over from nearby...

Perennial.(poem)(Brief Article)
January 1, 1999... We are alone in your car driving across northern California hills greener than any I have seen outside of England, yet we aren't even talking about the green swimming beyond the windshield, we are talking of Italy,...

Another Christmas.(poem)(Brief Article)
January 1, 1999... Our first Christmas together at Eagle Pond I bought a chain saw to cut the tree from our woodlot. Puffing with accomplishment I set an emaciated hemlock kitty-corner from the Glenwood. "What will become of...

Ghana, 1963: A Memoir.(an African American college professor traveled to Ghana in 1963)
January 1, 1999... A Memoir When the Ghana Airways jet lifted off from Heathrow direct to Accra at the end of September 1963, what I knew about sub-Saharan Africa consisted mostly of attentive gleanings from the Observer and the Guardian and a rather...

Putting Microcomputers in Their Place.(a computer science professor considers the use of computers)
January 1, 1999... http://www.when_is_enough_enough?.com In the misty past, before Bill Gates joined the company of the world's richest men, before the mass-marketed personal computer, before the metaphor of an information superhighway had been worn down to...

Loren Eiseley: Excavating the Self.(anthropologist)
January 1, 1999... Man is himself, like the universe he inhabits... a tale of desolations.... But out of such desolation emerges the awesome freedom to choose--to choose beyond the narrowly circumscribed circle that delimits the animal being. In that widening...

The Ups and Downs of Honor.(historical look at honor and heroism)
January 1, 1999... The oldest poem in our Western tradition opens with a quarrel about honor. The Greeks, who have spent several years besieging Troy, take time off to sack a neighboring city. From the plunder, a girl, the daughter of the priest of Apollo, has...

Kant's Friend Al.(poem)
January 1, 1999... There are things; and there is the Thing-in-itself, The Ding-an-sich. Things are everywhere. We touch them, chew them, stumble, knock them over, Make them up out of when and where And the jumble of sense: the green and...

Laura Riding: A Modernist Puzzle.(poet)
January 1, 1999... A Modernist Puzzle What are we to make of Laura Riding? This distinctively modern poet is little read today, rarely taught, and almost never anthologized. Until recently her prose had been out of print for decades. Riding produced most of...

Arendt and Eichmann at the Dinner Table.(Hannah Arendt; families used to discuss more at the dinner table)
January 1, 1999... The children of intellectuals confront history at the family dinner table. Over the clatter of forks on plates they hear their first discussions of the burning issues and insoluble problems, the provocative books, articles, and reviews that...

The Medical School and the University.(medical science should be more interdisciplinary)
January 1, 1999... The facade of one of the two outward-facing wings of the Yale School of Medicine bears an Ozymandian inscription: INSTITUTE OF HUMAN RELATIONS. As Shelley told us, that great conquerer's "shattered visage" and "vast and trunkless legs of...

Stead Made Me Do It.(an author tries to follow in author Christina Stead's footsteps)
January 1, 1999... The phone call would come at 3:00 A.M., and the town car would materialize fifteen minutes later: a sleek and murmurous vehicle that was a most unlikely sight on my Brooklyn side street. The backseat was as soft as the bed I had just abandoned,...

THE EVOLUTION OF THE BOOK.(Review)
January 1, 1999... THE EVOLUTION OF THE BOOK By Frederick Kilgour. Oxford University Press. $35. In the early nineteenth century, naturalists seeking to explain how the earth developed were grouped into two camps. On one side were the catastrophists, who...

AVATARS OF THE WORD: FROM PAPYRUS TO CYBERSPACE.(Review)
January 1, 1999... AVATARS OF THE WORD: FROM PAPYRUS TO CYBERSPACE By James O'Donnell. Harvard University Press. $24.95. In the early nineteenth century, naturalists seeking to explain how the earth developed were grouped into two camps. On one side were the...

MURDER MOST FOUL: THE KILLER AND THE AMERICAN GOTHIC IMAGINATION.(Review)
January 1, 1999... MURDER MOST FOUL: THE KILLER AND THE AMERICAN GOTHIC IMAGINATION By Karen Halttunen. Harvard University Press. $29.95. The recent spate of shootings of schoolchildren, by schoolchildren, at American schools has sent editorialists scurrying...

MAYHEM.(Review)
January 1, 1999... MAYHEM By Sissela Bok. Addison-Wesley. $22. The recent spate of shootings of schoolchildren, by schoolchildren, at American schools has sent editorialists scurrying to explain the apparent presence of murderous intent in the youngest of...

THE TALE OF THE 1002ND NIGHT.(Review)
January 1, 1999... THE TALE OF THE 1002ND NIGHT By Joseph Roth, translated by Michael Hoffman. St. Martin's Press. $23.95. A critic writing about Joseph Roth in the pages of the Times Literary Supplement described the elusive novelist as "one of the great...

THE DEATH OF ADAM: ESSAYS ON MODERN THOUGHT.(Review)
January 1, 1999... THE DEATH OF ADAM: ESSAYS ON MODERN THOUGHT By Marilynne Robinson. Houghton Mifflin. $23. The beauty of Marilynne Robinson's enchanting novel Housekeeping lies precisely in the explanations that surround and often overshadow its slender...

BEYOND BELIEF: ISLAMIC EXCURSIONS AMONG THE CONVERTED PEOPLES.(Review)
January 1, 1999... BEYOND BELIEF: ISLAMIC EXCURSIONS AMONG THE CONVERTED PEOPLES By V.S. Naipaul. Random House. $27.95. In his 1939 essay "Marrakech," George Orwell wrote that to Western eyes "people with brown skins are next door to invisible." Defining the...

SIR VIDIA'S SHADOW: A FRIENDSHIP ACROSS FIVE CONTINENTS.(Review)
January 1, 1999... SIR VIDIA'S SHADOW: A FRIENDSHIP ACROSS FIVE CONTINENTS By Paul Theroux. Houghton Mifflin. $23.95. In his 1939 essay "Marrakech," George Orwell wrote that to Western eyes "people with brown skins are next door to invisible." Defining the...