American Scholar articles from June 2003

American Scholar archives from June 2003

Fresh air.(Letter from the Editor)(Editorial)
June 22, 2003... Two new columnists join us in this issue. Phyllis Rose, who succeeds Francine du Plessix Gray as the summer proprietor of "At Large and At Small," is no stranger to our readers. Her SCHOLAR essays on Sicily, Wordsworth, and Ruskin--like her...

Embedding Trollope.(At Large And At Small)
June 22, 2003... Embedding journalists in Iraq alongside frontline troops was a fine idea. It guaranteed that the soldiers' own stories were told, so we did not repeat the Vietnam-era shame of blaming the troops for the war they were obliged to fight. We know...

News.(Commonplace Book)
June 22, 2003... The newspaper reader finds it very difficult to get at the truth of any situation, through the great mass of conjecture and rumor and conflicting statements. Often he feels completely baffled and defeated. This is not the fault of the press it...

Squaring the circle: managing an American policy dilemma in the Muslim world.
June 22, 2003... Historians will likely mark the American ouster of Saddam Hussein and occupation of Iraq as a defining moment in the history of United States foreign policy. The body of conventional wisdom behind this judgment is large. By launching their...

After Waterloo, What.(Brief Article)(Poem)
June 22, 2003... After Waterloo, What he ordered were parapets of dirt around the perimeter of his empire at Deadwood to fend off the madding trade winds and the eyes of the English, how many thousand English to keep him in his desert...

Summer Work.(Brief Article)(Poem)
June 22, 2003... Summer Work The slippery green frog that went to his death in the heron's pink throat was my small brother, and the heron with the white plumes like a crown on his head, who is washing now his great...

Twilight on the Porch Swing.(Poem)
June 22, 2003... Twilight on the Porch Swing I could have been on those slats forever, dangling from eye-hooks screwed into the tongue and groove. The links took hold of each other, framing small oval segments of the earth's four...

A Brief Partnership.(Brief Article)(Poem)
June 22, 2003... A Brief Partnership One afternoon I brought the bush hog out to trim the ragged hill above the fork that meanders down from the old Hatcher place, where Foster worked his mules those years ago. I made one cautious pass...

Suds.
June 22, 2003... I sit on a thin steel bench in the Quick Wash in Arlington, Texas, on a Sunday morning, like a worshiper in a pew, next to another of my sect. We stare through the glass doors of our clothes dryers. My load of towels is dark and nondescript,...

To Hear and Hear.(Brief Article)(Poem)
June 22, 2003... To Hear and Hear The hermit thrush is set for six to sing her song, as if it were the end of the world and she was stirred by dusk to sing the same sweet song again and again in the understory, as if to say, it's...

Incognito street.
June 22, 2003... The photograph that hangs on the wall of my office has been blown up from, a black-and-white original her son gave me once in Stockholm. It's a snapshot from her later years, perhaps when she was in her eighties. Earlier photos of her are...

Doorways: a visual essay.
June 22, 2003... What is a doorway? An early edition of Webster's Dictionary (1864) defines the doorway-plane as "the space between the door-way, properly so-called and the larger door-arch-way within which it is placed. It is often richly ornamented with...

Models for Reality.(Brief Article)(Poem)
June 22, 2003... Models for Reality There is the slightly out-of-focus electric plastic clock on the wall just above and to the left of the perfectly reproduced model of an English railway village: boys in knickers pushing black...

My Kafka problem.(Critical Essay)
June 22, 2003... I was introduced to Kafka by my father. I was a teenager. It was tax season and my father was holed up in his office, his desktop strewn with forms and receipts and mysterious shoe boxes filled with paper, the way, at exam time, it would be...

A Wedding Wish.(Brief Article)(Poem)
June 22, 2003... A Wedding Wish We look. Do they? If blindness were a lens it would be blank as the side windows of a stretch limo--our noses pressed against our own reflections. Here, since God is love, behold the man! And wife!...

Fortieth Birthday.(Poem)
June 22, 2003... Thus perishing is the initiation of becoming. How the past perishes is how the future becomes. --Alfred North Whitehead Fortieth Birthday My first memory is of a pedal car behind our home in Ohio. My father had risen to...

Confessing and Chanting more or less clearly.(Brief Article)(Poem)
June 22, 2003... Confessing and Chanting more or less clearly I am not a vegetarian like some of my grandchildren and pacifist friends and I have eaten, Italian style, Chinese style, Japanese style, Indian style, thousands I guess of...

The case of Julius Goebel: Stanford, 1905.
June 22, 2003... In the autumn of 1904, fewer than five months before her death--which would occur under very strange circumstances--Jane Stanford was planning a luncheon for faculty members of the university that she and her late husband, Leland, had founded...

Lamborghini Poem.(Brief Article)(Poem)
June 22, 2003... Lamborghini Poem I refuse to look at Lamborghinis, because Lamborghinis are driven to be seen. In a Lamborghini is a man with a Lamborghini need demanding "Look at me!" despite the tint on his hip-high windows. I...

Random Crumbs.(Brief Article)(Poem)
June 22, 2003... Random Crumbs for my grandson Fourth Wolsey of an undistinguished line, Two grandfathers, your father, now you, Ben, Two at least lovers of Yeats and of the prayer He made for his daughter when sea winds shook his...

Dead matter.
June 22, 2003... I do not sing of the warrior, returned at last from the wars and wandering. I am talking, instead, about a writer who has stumbled home after several weeks on the road, a scuffed version of Leopold Bloom's most unheroic Odysseus, the bloody...

Signs of life.(The Scientific Method)
June 22, 2003... It was a four-word e-mail. "Booyah," it said. "Sincerely, Freight Train." As soon as I read it, I stepped out of my office and hurried down the glass-walled corridor. Stealing a glance over Stanford's red-tiled roofs in the day's first...

Hopping freights.(Journal)
June 22, 2003... I spent two months jumping freight trains after becoming enthralled with Jack Black, a safecracker, stickup man, and opium addict who spent thirty years around the turn of the last century escaping the law by riding the rails through the...

Sue Barton and me.(Rereading)
June 22, 2003... In the winter of 2001, my father lay near death in something like the family firm. The teaching hospital in Rochester, New York, in which he was a cardiac patient was where he had trained as a medical student, worked as a doctor, and taught in...

Time travelers' tales.(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... THE CULTURE OF DEFEAT: ON NATIONAL TRAUMA, MOURNING, AND RECOVERY By Wolfgong Schivelbusch. Henry Holt. $27.50. Comparative history enriches the tapestry of the tales we tell, opens perspectives, suggests questions and possibilities,...

Everything to lose.(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... ENOUGH: STAYING HUMAN IN AN ENGINEERED AGE By Bill McKibben. Times Books. $25. To be impressed with Bill McKibben, you need know only this much: he ran a marathon in three hours and twenty minutes. At age forty-one. In fact, McKibben opens...

The court of humanity.(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... DEATH AS A WAY OF LIFE: ISRAEL TEN YEARS AFTER OSLO By David Grossman. Translated by Haim Watzman. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. $22. Fifteen years ago, the Israeli novelist David Grossman came to New York to publicize The Yellow Wind, a...

Black romantic.(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... THE COLLECTED WORKS OF LANGSTON HUGHES Edited by Arnold Rampersad. University of Missouri Press. Langston Hughes died in 1967, just as a wave of academic and popular interest in African American literature was sweeping the country. By that...

Ruins.(The Reader Replies)(Letter to the Editor)
June 22, 2003... Andre Bernard ("Commonplace Book," Spring 2003) rightly attributes a lament on the ruins of Rome to the Renaissance humanist Poggio Bracciolini. But the passage as cited (a single word excepted) is a translation that opens the final chapter of...

Genocide without apology.(The Reader Replies)(Letter to the Editor)
June 22, 2003... Francine Prose's essay on the Book of Exodus is as courageous (for both author and journal) as it is astute. One could take her argument further by examining the Hebrew conquest of the land of Canaan under Joshua, Moses' successor. It appears...

Two cheers for Darwin.(The Reader Replies)(Letter to the Editor)
June 22, 2003... D. T. Max has made by far the most literate criticism of Darwinism that I have read, yet it does not miss the scientific mark. It updates those criticisms of Darwinism that have long been made but never properly answered: the lack of examples...

Unlisted.(The Reader Replies)(Letter to the Editor)
June 22, 2003... Reading Noel Perrin's essay was a delight! His literary "gems" include two, When Patty Went to College and Guard of Honor, that have been favorites of mine for years. May I suggest two more forgotten books that (for me) gleam golden through the...

Treasure and vengeance.(The Reader Replies)(Letter to the Editor)
June 22, 2003... I'd like to add a footnote (from Andre Maurois's Les Trois Dumas) to that most excellent "Rereading" by Justin Kaplan about his lifelong affection for Alexandre Dumas's Count of Monte Cristo. In his last years, Dumas began rereading some of his...

The artist and the doctor.(The Reader Replies)(Letter to the Editor)
June 22, 2003... We wish to call your attention to serious shortcomings of scholarship in Sherwin B. Nuland's Winter 2003 essay on Thomas Eakins's The Gross Clinic, which hangs in Thomas Jefferson University's Eakins Gallery. Dr. Nuland argues that Eakins...

Patriotism is sticky.(The Podium)
June 22, 2003... In his 1945 essay "Notes on Nationalism," George Orwell wrote: "By patriotism, I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force on other people....