American Scholar articles from March 1997

American Scholar archives from March 1997

Will you still feed me? (reaching the age of 60)
March 22, 1997... Will you still need me, Will you still feed me, When I'm sixty-four. - Lennon and McCartney I know it's no great achievement - I realize people are doing it every day - but I am rather smugly pleased to have reached the stately age of...

Revolution in the library.
March 22, 1997... Historians are notoriously wary of the word revolution. Unlike journalists, who find revolutions in every twist and turn of political events, intellectual movements, technological innovations, sartorial fashions, historians like to think that...

Karl Popper: a memoir.
March 22, 1997... Karl Popper was born in Vienna on July 28, 1902, and died on September 17, 1994. His Logik der Forschung, published in 1934, was brought to the attention of Einstein, who thought highly of it. Popper visited England in 1936 and took up a post in...

Outsider. (poem)
March 22, 1997... "I am fine how are you" reads the earliest of the hundreds of letters you find in a drawer as you clear out your mother's apartment. Each one is signed with your name, but, as you read through the clutter, you only dimly remember a soldier...

Everything's important, everything's brief. (poem)
March 22, 1997... The stroke had killed his English. All that remained was Swedish he no longer spoke because the stroke had stilled his tongue as well. Phoning in his stead was Monica who asked if I would like to hear "the voice of Tomas." A man's voice,...

Altar boy.
March 22, 1997... I will go up to the altar of God The giver of youth and happiness. - Psalm 43 Introit I missed one Mass as an altar boy - the Tuesday dawn patrol, 6:00 A.M., Father Dennis Whelan presiding. He was a good-natured fellow, a cigar smoker,...

Bogie in Africa. (actor Humphrey Bogart)
March 22, 1997... By 1951 HUMPHREY BOGART had made sixty-three films, mostly under contract with Warner Brothers, and had recently done two movies that showed Bogart predictably being Bogart. Neither The Enforcer, a well-constructed gangster thriller, nor Sirocco,...

Art out of rubble. (Sarajevo after the war)
March 22, 1997... The Holiday Inn in Sarajevo is an irregular cube of a building. Portions of its exterior were sliced away by design long before the hotel began to be shelled. Even in the best of times, it must have resembled a corporate headquarters more than a...

The poetry of violence.
March 22, 1997... Given the extent to which technology has made power available and exploitable, especially in the media, the present widespread concern about TV violence comes as no surprise. Something like the National Television Violence Study was inevitable....

So long, maestro: a portrait of Merle Curti.
March 22, 1997... In early March 1946, my wife and I drove to Madison, Wisconsin, from Vermillion, South Dakota, in what turned out to be the worst snowstorm in seventy-five years. The war was over, time to unload the hostile gear of war and pick up the friendly...

Foreign policy and war powers: the presidency and the framers.
March 22, 1997... President Bill Clinton, like his recent predecessors, has claimed an authority to dispatch American troops anywhere in the world without congressional support or authorization. But Clinton and other proponents of inherent presidential powers in...

The Defoe that never was: a tale of de-attribution.
March 22, 1997... In art history, de-attribution can be frontpage news. (One only has to think of the Rembrandt Project or the purging of the Vermeer canon.) It is otherwise in literature. Here, only attribution really makes the headlines, and many are the column...

The Curator of Dreams.
March 22, 1997... It is, perhaps, the noose I put my own neck in, when I go to my children thinking I might save them from their nightmare dreams, and so speak their names, gently, again and again, saying, "I love you," stroking their hair with such...

The writing life.
March 22, 1997... Writers are different from other people. Not all writers -not those who write only for wages - but those for whom writing is no less necessary than sleeping, who receive the continuing news of their existence as potential lines on a page. For...

Great Books: My Adventures with Homer, Rousseau, Woolf, and Other Indestructible Writers of the Western World.
March 22, 1997... Reviewed by ALAN RUTENBERG David Denby, the film critic of New York magazine, presents himself as a poorly defined, forty-eight-year-old liberal, immersed in the unbearable lightness of movies and television and magazine articles, mildly...

The Day the Presses Stopped.
March 22, 1997... Reviewed by JOSEPH D. BECKER Minutes after the Supreme Court heard argument in the Pentagon Papers case, Justice John Harlan remarked at the conference of the justices - according to notes of Justice Douglas - that the case was a judicial...

Narcissism and Philanthropy: Ideas and Talent Denied.
March 22, 1997... Reviewed by PETER FRUMKIN Criticizing private foundations is like insulting a wealthy relative who is drawing up a will. It is something that should be done only after considerable thought about the consequences. Given the power that...

Beethoven Hero.
March 22, 1997... Reviewed by PETER SCHWENDENER The subject of this book is a musical style, namely Beethoven's heroic style. Its interest, according to Scott Burnham, lies in the fact that it is "a style to which only a handful of his works can lay unequivocal...

Conditions of Liberty: Civil Society and Its Rivals.
March 22, 1997... Reviewed by JEROME BRAUN Ernest Gellner, who passed away on November 5, 1995, was a social philosopher and social anthropologist and a student of the social evolution that culminated in what is now called modernity. He wrote much on the...

Critique of Modernity.
March 22, 1997... Reviewed by JEROME BRAUN Ernest Gellner, who passed away on November 5, 1995, was a social philosopher and social anthropologist and a student of the social evolution that culminated in what is now called modernity. He wrote much on the...

Otto Klemperer: His Life and Times, 2 vols.
March 22, 1997... Reviewed by JosEPH HOROWITZ I cannot think of a single living classical musician whose biography could be subtitled "His Life and Times." (Imagine: Luciano Pavarotti? Itzhak Perlman? James Levine?) But "Otto Klemperer: His Life and Times"...

The Sacred Fire of Liberty: James Madison and the Founding of the Federal Republic.
March 22, 1997... Reviewed by CHRISTOPHER FLANNERY In 1790, Thomas Jefferson called James Madison "the greatest man in the world." In the 1990s, academic historians generally frown on such talk. They insist that because there is always disagreement about what...