Books
By Peter Walsh “But the trouble continued to spread over the country, and there were reports of big concerns, and even banks, in trouble.” — Upton Sinclair, Oil! (1927) No doubt there are still those who think economics is a dull, plodding technical field, akin to accounting, which pale men in green eyeshades practice somewhere…
by Bill Marx A recent study in Editor & Publisher delivers the lowdown; with its circulation down about 20% in four years, The Boston Globe is in free fall. Two major investors in The New York Times, which owns the Globe, are “challenging the company’s investment decisions, including its commitment to the struggling newspaper industry…
by Peter Walsh “Collective intelligence has no relationship to the stupidity of crowd behavior.” — Pierre Lévy, The Collective Intelligence The day before the New Hampshire primary, I went with a friend to hear George Packer, author of The Assassin’s Gate: America in Iraq, speak at Dartmouth College. I knew George twenty years ago, when…
ArtsFuse editor Bill Marx speaks with Gail Pool, the author of Faint Praise: The Plight of Book Reviewing in America, about the slow decline of literary criticism in the United States.
By Harvey Blume Zugzwang,by Ronan Bennett (Bloomsbury USA, 288 pages) It’s an understatement to say chess has been good for literature; the game has even inspired people not known for the written word to produce memorable prose. Consider the following, for example, by composer Sergey Prokofiev apropos a game he witnessed in pre-World War I…
Death, starvation, futility, revolution, exploitation — no wonder The Weavers is never produced in the land of plenty.
By Bill Marx and Harvey Blume I was asked by National Public Radio’s Morning Edition to write an appreciation of the late Norman Mailer. I have posted an unabridged version of this necessarily short piece. After that, I have placed an interview Harvey Blume had with Mailer after the publication of his 1995 book Oswald’s…
By Bill Marx Edmund Wilson: A Life in Literature (Paperback) By Lewis M. Dabney. Johns Hopkins University Press, 672 pages, $25. Literary Essays and Reviews of the 1920s & 30s (Library of America #176) By Edmund Wilson. Edited by Lewis M. Dabney. 1026 pages, $40. Literary Essays and Reviews of the 1930s & 40s (Library…
Those uncomfortable with Wilson’s eccentricities suggest he should be admired, but dutifully, like a Roman statue stuck in the far corner of the lawn.
by Harvey Blume Ex-Catholic nun Karen Armstrong has, in her long, productive second career as scholar, written 21 books, including A History of God: The 4000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and engaging, balanced biographies of Buddha and Muhammed. I interviewed her about the Buddha biography when it came out in 2001 and enjoyed…
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