American Scholar articles from June 2000

American Scholar archives from June 2000

Grief.(Brief Article)
June 22, 2000... Two pieces in this issue touch, directly or tangentially, on mourning. One is by Francine du Plessix Gray, who will write the "At Large and At Small" column each summer. "My stepfather and my best friend had died within four days of each...

Marriage.
June 22, 2000... Perhaps the most remarkable thing the sexes have in common is that they bother to marry at all. Marriage is a cultural universal; it predominates in every society in the world. -- HELEN FISHER, The Anatomy of Love, 1992 Next, when they...

Truth, Lies, Fact, Fiction.(Review)
June 22, 2000... In most scholarly research, and in the digging out and reporting of news, fact means true. In the writing of fiction, fact and truth are less easy to reconcile. I am an amphibian, inhabiting the classrooms of a university as well as the...

The Loon.(Brief Article)
June 22, 2000... Not quite four A.M., when the rapture of being alive strikes me from sleep, and I rise from the comfortable bed and go to another room, where my books are lined up in their neat and colorful rows. How magical they...

Falling in Love with Yiddish.
June 22, 2000... I fell in love with Yiddish in 1994, which is to say, too late. I was thirty-two years old at the time and felt that the most interesting and meaningful parts of life--marriage, family, career--were still out there ahead of me. For Yiddish, at...

Frog Doctor.(Brief Article)
June 22, 2000... i At her seventy-fifth birthday party, Debbie reminds her son John of something he said forty years ago, in the summer of 1953. The narrative of this shared memory is not simple. Almost completely deaf from...

A Dialogue Between Poetry and Grief.(Brief Article)
June 22, 2000... (For the first anniversary of the embassy bombings at Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, August 7, 1998) O Death, called mighty and dreadful, be not proud: For you are slave to Chance and desperate men. But death is no person. No...

Like Hyenas, Like Baudelaire, Like the Angel of the Resurrection.
June 22, 2000... If Christ had refused to touch the lepers and to speak with the Samaritan woman, the former would have remained sick and the latter sinful. The Christian is supposed to be attracted to rotting flesh, like hyenas, like Baudelaire, like the angel...

Reminiscing Concerning an Edenic Scene.(Brief Article)
June 22, 2000... Idyllic on a tiny island just large enough for the more or less seven seals, wet, plump, rubbery looking, content, lounging, on vacation, whiskered, slippery, one more elegant than Mme. Recamier, was that the one...

Vacationing in Croatia.
June 22, 2000... Even during the NATO blitz over Yugoslavia, I kept alive my daydream that for our family summer vacation we might drift in the soft currents off the Dalmatian coastline. If the lightning warfare achieved neither the demise of Slobodan Milosevic...

Hosanna in the Family.(Brief Article)
June 22, 2000... Uncle Earl rolled his eyes over Aunt Bernice and winked. Aunt Bernice was a honey, curvy and plump. Earl deeded her parents a section of his ranch, a dowry she didn't have, sweetheart so well endowed he didn't mind, ...

The Anatomy Wildflowers.(Brief Article)
June 22, 2000... On the first day of summer, my grandmother plunges her hands into the secret organs of the earth and pulls out flowers: a trandafir, the Romanian rose, a dandelion and the violet. Her hands are not tender, like the...

Relief.(Brief Article)
June 22, 2000... The morning is high with young air. What does it know from the old wind, the crackle of leaves, sad notes about beauty--the hours perfumed by pastels, then violent reds? The blood lily with its fleshy stem ...

Max Weber in America.
June 22, 2000... In the summer of 1903, the Heidelberg sociologist Max Weber had a visit from Hugo Munsterberg, a Harvard professor known for his pioneering work in the new field of applied psychology. Dr. Munsterberg was promoting an international gathering of...

Jump.(Brief Article)
June 22, 2000... One day years ago, in full midsummer, we drove to Berne, my father, my brother and I. The American Consulate was down by the Aar River, so I watched the Swiss children as they floated by from right to left, borne up on...

The Soul of Plutarchos.
June 22, 2000... As with most of the greatest writers in Western history--Homer, Shakespeare, the gaggle of anonymous geniuses who wrote the Bible--we don't know much about Plutarch of Greece in the usual biographically fussy way. Born in the year 45 A.D. or...

Hidden Meanings.
June 22, 2000... The notion of sympathy between various organs of the body has existed since ancient times. As recently as 150 years ago, in fact, it was still a major influence on medical thought. Physicians theorized that events and qualities--even...

Provincetown.
June 22, 2000... Two weeks ago, I heard my phone twittering in the dusk. It was Alec Wilkinson, calling from Truro to ask if I would introduce him at his reading at the Provincetown Art Association on August 8. I told him I wanted a night to think it over, but...

The Wodehouse Jacquerie.
June 22, 2000... The works of P. G. Wodehouse are, I've found, a pretty reliable guide to character. If you are part of the benighted ghetto that is not amused by Bertie Wooster's account of Gussie Fink-Nottle giving away the prizes to the boys of Market...

THE COLLABORATOR: THE TRIAL AND EXECUTION OF ROBERT BRASILLACH.(Review)
June 22, 2000... THE COLLABORATOR: THE TRIAL AND EXECUTION OF ROBERT BRASILLACH By Alice Kaplan. Chicago. $25. As part of the general process of epuration undertaken by the French government after the liberation of Paris, a number of collaborationist...

SHAKESPEARE'S LANGUAGE.(Review)
June 22, 2000... SHAKESPEARE'S LANGUAGE By Frank Kermode, Farrar, Strauss & Giroux. $30. That irregular but persistent sequence of distinguished critical texts--Sir Frank Kermode's fifteen volumes of literary judgment, speculation, and response, in which...

THE LAND WAS EVERYTHING: LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN FARMER.(Review)
June 22, 2000... THE LAND WAS EVERYTHING: LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN FARMER By Victor Davis Hanson. Free Press. $24. As its subtitle suggests, Hanson's discourse on the decline of the family farm is cast in the form of letters that attempt to do for...

THE CHIEF: THE LIFE OF WILLIAM RANDOLPH HEARST.(Review)
June 22, 2000... THE CHIEF: THE CHIEF OF WILLIAM RANDOLPH HEARST By David Nasaw. Houghton Mifflin. $40. A major event in the annals of American publishing occurred in mid-March; it will necessitate some updating in histories and biographies, including...

GIVE ME MY FATHER'S BODY.(Review)
June 22, 2000... GIVE ME MY FATHER'S BODY By Kenn Harper. Steerforth Press. $24. On a cold February evening in 1898, an observer on the grounds of the American Museum of Natural History might have witnessed a strange and unprecedented ceremony: a weeping...

THE READER REPLIES.
June 22, 2000... ON NOT BEING A POET Thomas Mallon defines the poet too narrowly, disparaging Shelley's conclusion that "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world." If poetry be merely metrics, short lines, vague thoughts, then Shelley was a...

Fireworks.(Brief Article)
June 22, 2000... The Fourth of July is the greatest day of the year. School is out, you can go barefoot, and, best of all, there are fireworks. In my youth, of course, they were legal. I'd order them from catalogues--Roman candles, snakes in the grass, an...