American Scholar articles from January 2006

American Scholar archives from January 2006

Replacements.(Editor's Note)
January 1, 2006... Recently I gave myself over to modern science as I never had before, submitting to the first of two much-needed hip-replacement operations. Much as I long to share all the fascinating details with you, suffice it to say that I seem to be...

An Eden with barbed wire.(Letter From Mae La; refugee camp )
January 1, 2006... I finally met someone from Mae La to answer my questions about life there. She was hard to find, but that's understandable. For starters, not many people are from Mae La. It is a remote place--only one road leads to its location in the valley...

Mountains.(Commonplace Book; brief descriptions of mountains by various writers)
January 1, 2006... According to Poseidonius, when [Mt. Aetna] is in action, the fields of the Catanaeans are covered with ash-dust to a great depth. Now although the ash is an affliction at the time, it benefits the country in later times, for it renders it...

One man's midden.(Works In Progress)(Roger Macfarlane)(Oxyrhynchus Papyri)(Brief article)
January 1, 2006... Professor of Classics Roger Macfarlane of Brigham Young University hopes to gain the greatest possible knowledge from the ancients' trash. About the time of Christ, inhabitants of the Egyptian town of Oxyrhynchus began disposing of of old...

Foot joy.(Works In Progress; Angie Kim's 'Empower Concept Shoe' winner of Industrial Designers of America student award)
January 1, 2006... Assigned to devise a product promoting physical fitness, Angie Kim, an industrial design student at San Jose state University, began by interviewing a man with severe arthritis. She learned that, for those with a disability or decreased...

No saint?(Works In Progress)(canonization)(Brief article)
January 1, 2006... Progress toward sainthood may be measured in months--as with Mother Teresa--or in lifetimes, as is the case of most candidates. The advancement of one candidate, Leon Gustave Dehon, a French priest who founded the priesthood of the Sacred Heart...

Kiss of the spider venom.(Works In Progress)(research of insecticides)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2006... Despite a billion pounds of chemical insecticides sprayed each year in the United States, natural selection ensures that the survivors of a pesticide's onslaught pass their resistance on to new generations. As insecticides lose their...

Never mind.(Quote Unquote)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2006... Did Horace Greeley really say "Go West, young man"? Fred R. Shapiro, now editing The Yale Dictionary of Quotations, and his researchers used the latest linguistic techniques in their search of written materials, and in the process they revealed...

The dispossessed: first we stopped noticing members of the working class, and now we're convinced they don't exist.(Exhortation)
January 1, 2006... Sometimes you don't realize that something's been missing--it doesn't matter how big it is--until, for a moment or two, it isn't. About 10 years ago, I was listening to an interview with the choreographer Bill T. Jones, who had just published...

The new anti-Semitism: first religion, then race, then what?(standards of judgment)
January 1, 2006... There is a well-worn platitude that we have all heard many times before: it is perfectly legitimate to criticize the actions and policies of the state of Israel or the doctrines of Zionism without necessarily being motivated by anti-Semitism....

My Holocaust problem: if we cannot speak of it--though speak of it we must--how do we remember what happened to the Jews of Europe?(child of Holocaust survivor finds it difficult to speak or read about the Holocaust)
January 1, 2006... I did not read Daniel Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners. Nor have I read Raul Hilberg's The Destruction of the Eurpean Jews, or David Wyman's The Abandonment of the Jews, or, for that matter, any of the hundreds of well-received books...

The bomb in the sanctuary: Michael Longley, an Ulsterman in Arcadia.(POETRY)
January 1, 2006... Among the distinguished poets from Northern Ireland who matured in the long era of sectarian violence known as The Troubles--a cohort that includes Seamus Heaney and Derek Mahon--Michael Longley is the pure lyric artist. Lucidity, economy,...

Otter Cubs.(Poem)
January 1, 2006... Otter Cubs As I listened to their gasps and sneezes, They reappeared in memory out there Among the reeds, and at my feet milkwort's Sapphire glimmers seemed retina-born.

The New Window.(Poem)
January 1, 2006... The New Window Sitting up in bed with binoculars I scan My final resting place in Dooaghtry Through the new window, soul-space For my promontory, high and dry, Fairy Fort the children called it, rising above ...

White Farmhouse.(Poem)
January 1, 2006... White Farmhouse after Colin Miclclleton Colin Middleton knew that he was dying And fitted all the colours he had ever used Into his last painting, a white farmhouse Among drumlins, the gable and chimneys White,...

Altarpiece.(Poem)
January 1, 2006... Altarpiece The page-boy in the bottom right-hand corner Looks out and draws me into the diagonal Drama. Or so I thought. Rather, he brings Histrionic saint and successful soldier (A Titian self-portrait?) down to my...

Mars.(Poem)
January 1, 2006... Mars Mars was as close as this so long ago It reminded us of the Neanderthals. We were stargazing under a beech tree That could have sheltered United Irishmen. We were squinting at Mars through binoculars. "The...

Christmas Tree.(Poem)
January 1, 2006... Christmas Tree You are my second grandson, Christmas-born. I put on specs to read your face. Whispering Sweet nothings to your glistening eyelids, Am I outspoken compared with you? You sleep While I carry you to our...

Lullaby.(Poem)
January 1, 2006... Lullaby The vixen will hear you cry, and the swans On their eggless experimental nest, And the insomniac curlew, and the leveret That leaves a dew-path across the lawn.

Palladio in the rough: a South Carolinian builds classical revival houses that really look old.(Historic Renovations of Charleston)
January 1, 2006... The suburbs of Charleston, South Carolina, resemble those of any other modern metropolitan area: strip malls line highways, and drive-through restaurants mask a leafy interior of residential subdivisions with such names as Sweetgrass, North...

Fadeaway jumper: a Sunday-afternoon player of a certain age says his farewell to basketball.
January 1, 2006... In not too long, I'll play my last game of basketball. I'm 53 now. Few people play past 40; not many at all reach 50 and still play. You'll have an easier time finding diamonds in the parking lot than finding 60year-olds going full court....

Flat time: the ebb and flow of life in a Newfoundland fishing village.(sense of time and history different in Squid Tickle fishing village)
January 1, 2006... The Newfoundlander's concept of time, at least as I have experienced it in the small outport, or fishing village, of Squid Tickle, is a peculiarly flattened one. I first became aware of this while listening to many of the local stories that had...

Boy Shooting at a Statue.(Poem)
January 1, 2006... Boy Shooting at a Statue It was late afternoon, the beginning of winter, a light snow, and I was the only one in the small park to witness the lone boy running in circles around the base of a bronze statue. I...

Buster brown's America: how a Jew from Slovakia became a Catholic from Manhattan, then fell from grace and turned into a real American.
January 1, 2006... On 207th Street, way uptown in Manhattan, a couple of blocks north of the elevated subway, there used to be a Buster Brown shoe store. This was in the 1950s. The most wonderful thing in that store was a magical contraption kept in the rear...

The lieutenant: inept in the art of warfare, this volunteer soldier succeeded on a different field.(Absalom Grimes)
January 1, 2006... In the spring of 1852 a young man named Absalom Grimes earned his license as a fiver pilot on the Mississippi. For the next nine years he skippered steamboats between Missouri and Minnesota; among the ships under his hand were the Sunshine and...

Brand-new cities: Frank Gehry's Bilbao effect looks a lot like 1960s-style urban renewal.(Architecture)
January 1, 2006... When he was eight years old, the future architect Frank Gehry and his mother paid a visit to the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto. It was within these hushed halls that Gehry made a discovery: something called art existed, and art was some...

Lenny's Little Chats: envy the children who learned music from the maestro, Leonard Bernstein.(Music; one person's thoughts on pre-concert lectures)
January 1, 2006... Listening to Mahler's Ninth Symphony has always been something of a meditative experience for me, whether in the concert hall or on the five or six recordings I have collected over the years. The symphony's long final adagio is especially...

The one who went before: remembering the playwright August Wilson, 1945-2005.(Obituary)(Biography)
January 1, 2006... Something was happening in New Haven, Connecticut, in the blossoming spring of 1984. Creative black people seemed to be everywhere: in earnest conversation over endless cups of coffee, talking big and doing big, believing in culture and its...

A man in it: President Lincoln filled his cabinet with political opponents, but through force of personality shaped them for the tasks ahead.(Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln)(Book Review)
January 1, 2006... TEAM OF RIVALS: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln By Doris Kearns Goodwin Simon & Schuster $35 One of the better old books on Lincoln, from 1946, was Lincoln's War Cabinet, by Burton J. Hendrick. That volume praised the way Lincoln...

Darwin's greatest discovery: the complex designs of living things need not imply a designer.(Darwin: Discovering the Tree of Life)(Book Review)
January 1, 2006... DARWIN : Discovering the Tree of Life By Niles Eldredge W.W. Norton $35 The discoveries of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton in the 16th and 17th centuries ushered in the Copernican Revolution. It was shown that the earth is not the...

Casting a cold eye on the cold war: did we avoid Armageddon out of good sense or dumb luck?(The Cold War: A New History)(Book Review)
January 1, 2006... THE COLD WAR: A New History By John Lewis Gad& Penguin Press $27.95 We Now Know was the title that John Lewis Gaddis of Yale University bestowed on his 1997 effort to address some outstanding historiographical issues hovering over the Cold...

Earthman.(The Way of Ignorance and Other Essays)(Book Review)
January 1, 2006... THE WAY OF IGNORANCE AND OTHER ESSAYS By Wendell Berry; Shoemaker & Hoard; $24 Wendell Berry has produced at least one book for each of the 40 years he has worked his hillside farm. He has anchored himself to the land--specifically, to a...

Reading lists.(Every Book Its Reader: The Power of the Printed Word to Stir the World )(Book Review)
January 1, 2006... EVERY BOOK ITS READER: The Power of the Printed Word to Stir the World By Nicholas A. Basbanes; Harper Collins; $29.95 I stared at that subtitle for several days. Knowing that Nicholas Basbanes has written about books before (notably A...

Eminent domain.(The Letters of Lytton Strachey)(Book Review)
January 1, 2006... THE LETTERS OF LYTTON STRACHEY Edited by Paul Levy; Farrar, Straus and Giroux; $40 "What [do] you imagine will happen to us all when we have got rid of every vestige of early Victoria?" Lytton Strachey asks Leonard Woolfin 1901, nearly 17...

Letter from a teacher.(THE READER REPLIES)(Letter to the Editor)
January 1, 2006... As a Lutheran pastor, I agree with the "Letter from a Teacher" in the Autumn 9005 issue in being opposed to teaching religion in public schools. I question what would be taught and who would supervise what is being taught. I do not want my...

The abuses of enchantment.(Letter to the Editor)
January 1, 2006... "I have often found that those who uncover despots are often remarkably tyrannical in their own judgments," writes a confident correspondent in "The Reader Replies" for Autumn (on "Letter from Rome"). This observation finds a nice corollary in...

Proof is in the primes.(THE READER REPLIES)(Letter to the editor)
January 1, 2006... I was very happy to see the brief article "Proof is in the Primes" in the Autumn issue. It is always nice to see mathematical advances publicized to the wider community. However, there were a couple of inaccuracies. First, the name of the...

Teaching the n-word.(Letter to the Editor)
January 1, 2006... In teaching Freedom of Speech Under the First Amendment, I ask students whether there are certain words that hurt too much and therefore should not be protected speech even though the Supreme Court has ruled to the contrary in cases, some of...

Appalachian autumn.(THE READER REPLIES)(Letter to the editor)
January 1, 2006... Charles Wright's "Appalachian Autumn" (Autumn 2005) is poetically impressive, and its language is elegant. In a world that doesn't believe in poets, anyone who has published 17 books of poems qualifies as a worker of miracles. ARTHUR H....

Honestly, Abe!(Findings; young Abe Lincoln's sense of humor )(Brief article)
January 1, 2006... In 2005 1 published a short biography of Martin Van Buren. Time and again, I found surprises that did not fit inside the encyclopedia entry I was expecting to write: Van Buren spoke Dutch before English; he owned a single slave; J. Q. Adams...