New Criterion articles from November 2006

New Criterion archives from November 2006

"America Alone".(Notes & Comments: November 2006)(status of American history education)(Viewpoint essay)
November 1, 2006... A few days ago, we received an email from a friend who teaches at Emory University. "As I am typing this," she wrote, "I hear the Moslem call to prayer being played across the entire campus over a loudspeaker.... Do you think I could arrange...

Romancing I. F. Stone.(All Governments Lie: The Life and Times of Rebel Journalist I. F. Stone)(The Best of I. F. Stone)(Book review)
November 1, 2006... By the time he died in 1989, the once outcast and radical journalist I. F. Stone, fondly called "Izzy" by all who knew him, had become an icon. The blurbs on the back of Myra MacPherson's new look at Stone's life are from the likes of...

The human race: success or failure?(Viewpoint essay)
November 1, 2006... There have been times recently when I have scarcely dared to open the newspaper for fear of discovering the latest enormity committed by our fellow human beings. You all know the feeling. At this rate, will the human race survive? Does it...

Seduction & politics.(Viewpoint essay)
November 1, 2006... The original meaning of "seduction" was "to persuade a vassal, servant, soldier, etc. to desert his allegiances or service." The OED dates that first usage from 1477, and it was only in 1560 that "seduction" came to be used also as inducing a...

In the empty quarter.(Wilfred Thesiger: The Life of the Great Explorer)(Book review)
November 1, 2006... The telltale knocking of opportunity sounds different to each of us, no doubt, but to Wilfred Thesiger it had an especially odd timbre. It was at a dinner party in Addis Ababa--not a place much known for affording opportunities--that he meta...

Crystal but not crystal ball.(Poem)
November 1, 2006... Crystal but not crystal ball Upon the sapphire is the light a star? Who is to say it is not compass points, Or non-Euclidean geometry Upon the rounded blue? As sign a star, The shining asterisk is star but less; ...

Afterward.(Poem)
November 1, 2006... Afterward An earthquake jolts aside the stone; The tomb is empty. An unknown Informant says "He is not here." And so we have to go from there. The highway to Emmaus leads No farther than where hearsay...

The fruits of the sea.(Poem)
November 1, 2006... The fruits of the sea First time we've met, her ex-lover boy and I, seated together, both of them long settled in other beds. She's in the kitchen: thin hands, bumpy knuckle bones of the dancer she once was, picking over...

Three oaks.(Poem)
November 1, 2006... Three oaks I stopped this morning on a curve of the Lenox Road, just where East Road branches off (you won't know where this is, I realize), because of a--a feeling of accomplished peace, I guess I'd call it, though such a...

David Jones & the sacrament of art.(Reconsiderations)(Critical essay)
November 1, 2006... Shy, retiring, religious, and physically frail, David Jones (1895-1974) considered art a "sacrament," an act of co-creation that connects us to God. In a 1962 BBC address, Jones warned that "the nature of man demands the sacramental. If he's...

Heartbroken wrecks.(Theater)(Heartbreak House)(Wrecks)(Theater review)
November 1, 2006... Moral didacticism, usually of a political bent, is the curse of the contemporary theater and has been for some twenty years. In the hands of a less than subtle director or writer, the audience member's experience is too often that of being...

"Constable's Great Landscapes: The Six-Foot Paintings" The National Gallery of Art.(Exhibition note)(John Constable)
November 1, 2006... "Constable's Great Landscapes: The Six-Foot Paintings" The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. October 1, 2006-December 31, 2006 The large landscape paintings of John Constable, from The White Horse (1819) to the sketch for...

A new era in scandalology.(The media)(Viewpoint essay)
November 1, 2006... "Stories that couldn't be more different--Bob Woodward's new book and the Mark Foley sex scandal--are examples of the difference between get-it-in-the-paper-now journalism and how-did-it-really-happen journalism." Or so wrote Deborah Howell,...

Severe manners.(Fiction chronicle)(The View from Castle Rock: Stories)(Talk Talk)(Special Topics in Calamity Physics)(Book review)
November 1, 2006... The Royal 10 typewriter was introduced in 1914 and was one of the last real advances in typewriter design. It had side panels of bevelled glass because the levers, gears, couplings, and pins which converted the downward thrust of your finger to...

The new appeasement.(America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It)(Book review)
November 1, 2006... The wider English-reading public discovered the genius of Mark Steyn after September 11, and for two reasons other than the fact that his amazing prolificacy did not come at the expense of quality. First, he is funny in an understated way;...

The spy who cured me.(Europe's Physician: The Various Life of Theodore De Mayerne)(Book review)
November 1, 2006... Hugh Trevor-Roper Europe's Physician: The Various Life of Theodore de Mayerne. Yale University Press, 464 pages, $35 If anything can redeem the posthumous standing of Hugh Trevor-Roper, Lord Dacre (1914-2003), Europe's Physician should do...

Canon fodder.(What's Liberal About the Liberal Arts?: Classroom Politics and "Bias" in Higher Education)(Book review)
November 1, 2006... Michael Berube What's Liberal About the Liberal Arts?: Classroom Politics & "Bias" in Higher Education. W. W. Norton, 344 pages, $26.95 For many years, Michael Berube has been an outspoken and topical voice in the humanities professoriate....

Hatred and fantasy.(The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda During World War II and the Holocaust)(Book review)
November 1, 2006... Jeffrey Herf The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda During World War II & the Holocaust. Harvard University Press, 416 pages, $29.95 Which of the major findings of this excellent study is more disturbing: that human beings are capable of...

Iran's other book.(Shahnameh)(Book review)
November 1, 2006... Abolqasem Ferdowsi Shahnameh, translated by Dick Davis. Viking, 886 pages, $45 Beware of the man with just one book. Having seen what Osama bin Laden's misinterpretation of a single text has inspired, many fear single-minded Islamists...

All bark, no bite.(The Yage Letters Redux)(Book review)
November 1, 2006... William S. Burroughs & Allen Ginsberg The Yage Letters Redux. City Lights Books, 180 pages, $13.95 It is a sign of the times, I suppose, that Oliver Harris, a professor at a respectable British university, can devote his scholarly endeavor...

Proust plural.(Marcel Proust Letters)(Book review)
November 1, 2006... Marcel Proust Letters, translated by Mina Curtiss, with an introduction by Adam Gopnik. Helen Marx Books, 462 pages, $17.95 "The letters which we receive from a person should be more or less similar to one another and combine to trace an...

Morri Creech: Field Knowledge.(Book review)
November 1, 2006... Morri Creech Field Knowledge. Waywiser Press, 73 pages, $15.95 Winner of the first annual Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize, judged by Hecht's literary executor, J. D. McClatchy, Morri Creech's Field Knowledge has set the bar high for future...

Yevgeny Zamyatin: We.(Book review)
November 1, 2006... Yevgeny Zamyatin We. Modern Library, 240 pages, $12.95 Yevgeny Zamyatin was first imprisoned in 1906 in Czarist Russia, only to find himself again in the same hallway of the same prison eighteen years later, this time--with a twist!--at the...