American Scholar articles from June 1997

American Scholar archives from June 1997

Anglophilia, American style. (admiration for everything that's English)
June 22, 1997... Anglophilia came to me almost as naturally as hemophilia to its unfortunate victims - it was, that is to say, in my blood. It began with my father, who was born a Canadian and thus into Dominion status and who had enormous admiration for the...

There's rosemary for remembrance. (rose gardens as tributes to war heroes)
June 22, 1997... I wouldn't mind," I heard a woman's voice sobbing at my elbow "I wouldn't mind if my son had been killed. I wouldn't mind - if he could be here." Tears streamed down her kindly face. She clutched my elbow. "I wouldn't mind." There was a scent of...

The aging of democracies. (youth metaphor applied to America)
June 22, 1997... In exploring European views, criticisms, fantasies, and delusions about democracy in the United States during the last two centuries, I discover that, almost from the start, European spokesmen tended to adopt a somewhat parental tone in...

Out of nowhere. (poem)
June 22, 1997... There was a depression in the house even after '42, It may have always been that way. 40-watt bulbs - even the moths went elsewhere. He was a half-breed. His father walked a Trail of Tears to Oklahoma where he was born. In a foxhole,...

Being Jewish: the endless quest. (quest for learning)
June 22, 1997... Sometimes when I wonder at the source of my idiosyncratic attitudes, so out of accord with the acquisitive spirit about me, I think of my mother who listened secretly at the door while her brothers fed on the learning denied her. I think also...

Tentative prolegomena on the two ways. (poem)
June 22, 1997... There are two ways to read a book: One is to hold it at fourteen inches using your eyes to search through the leaves. The other is to let the voice wrap around you. When Augustine met Jerome, long after the episode with the pears, he was...

Talcott Parsons, my teacher. (founder of the Department of Social Relations at Harvard)
June 22, 1997... It was primarily to study with Talcott Parsons that I chose to do my graduate work in sociology in the Harvard Department of Social Relations. Parsons founded the Department of Social Relations to provide interdisciplinary as well as disciplinary...

Letter from Tibet. (experiences during trips to Tibet)
June 22, 1997... In the last decade I have made three extensive visits to Tibet. On these visits I both explored new terrain and returned to places like Lhasa where I had been before. This has given me a kind of barometer as to what has happened in the country...

The novelist. (poem)
June 22, 1997... I have the urge to write a Russian novel - live it, breathe it, slowly becoming Russian until I'm finished being young Mikhail or beautiful Natasha so in love with him, finished being a hundred thousand others from serf to prince, chambermaid to...

Mr. Travis. (poem)
June 22, 1997... When he leaves his office - desk meticulous, drawers locked tight, he walks down the aisle of clerical workers aware of his power but avoiding their eyes. If Alice looks up he will nod severely. If they both go down in the same elevator he will...

Schubert at 200. (Franz Schubert's 200th birth anniversary)
June 22, 1997... Franz Schubert, born two hundred years ago, is an icon without a face. In the pantheon of Great Composers, his is the least stable, least identifiable countenance. During the Mozart Bicentennial much was made of the elusiveness of Mozart the...

On the road without a Pulitzer. (travel writers)
June 22, 1997... In the spring of 1990 I flew to Los Angeles to attend my first newspaper travel editors' meeting. I had become a travel editor the previous August, and, though in the succeeding months I had put out a weekly section, written a regular column,...

Paradelle for Susan. (poem)
June 22, 1997... I will remember the quick, nervous bird of your love. I will remember the quick, nervous bird of your love. Always perched on the thinnest, highest branch. Always perched on the thinnest, highest branch. Thinnest love, remember the quick branch....

The Berg. (Berg Collection of the New York Public Library)
June 22, 1997... Most major European libraries, universities, and museums grew slowly over centuries. Begun as private or ecclesiastical enterprises, they developed according to no particular plan under the inconsistent guidance of successive popes, emperors,...

Fear and hatred. (Communist and pro-Communist intellectuals' fear and hatred)
June 22, 1997... I read a small collection of interesting historical documents. They are a secretary's records of the highly secret meetings of the Soviet Russian Politburo in late October 1956, during the Hungarian Revolution, twelve days that stunned the world,...

Alan Paton's tragic liberalism. (novelist)
June 22, 1997... In an essay written in 1975, Nadine Gordimer declared that South African literature in English had "made a new beginning with Alan Paton's Cry, the Beloved Country, and indeed it could be said that Paton's novel put South Africa on the...

First words. (poem)
June 22, 1997... The way the words push through your lips sometimes makes me think of the birth of a foal who squeezes through the dark a little misshapen and folded trying to stand on wobbly legs and shake himself open. Sometimes you make me think of a fish...

James Joyce's comic Messiah.
June 22, 1997... The reasons that drew Joyce to cast his modern Everyman in the mold of the classical Ulysses have been broadly evident to readers since the first publication of the novel. Of all the epic heroes of antiquity, Ulysses is the one who most fully...

The Dreyfus Affair: 'J'accuse' and Other Writings.
June 22, 1997... Reviewed by CATHERINE LEGOUIS A convulsion of courts-martial, lawsuits, and political and journalistic battles that tore France apart between 1894 and 1906, the Dreyfus Affair makes Watergate seem straightforward and almost inconsequential....

Lessons from Privilege: The American Prep School Tradition.
June 22, 1997... Reviewed by DAVID V. HICKS Before drawing any lessons, Arthur Powell reminds us of some facts about American private education that are easy to ignore or forget. How many, even among those who teach in private schools, understand the...

Generation X Goes to College: An Eye-Opening Account of Teaching in Post-Modern America.
June 22, 1997... Reviewed by HENRY BAUER Scattered mostly in the back and far side rows were young males with professional sports baseball caps, often worn backwards. Completing the uniform . . . was usually a pair of baggy shorts, a team T-shirt, and an ample...

United States Reports, vol. 517, Cases Adjudged in the Supreme Court at October Term, 1995.
June 22, 1997... Reviewed by JOSEPH D. BECKER In December 1790, a brand new United States Supreme Court of six justices moved from the second floor of the Royal Exchange Building in New York to temporary quarters in the State House, Philadelphia, the new seat...