Does George W. Bush Get a Bum Rap?
Was President George W. Bush not as bad as his countless critics have painted him? Stephen F. Knott thinks the 43rd president doesn’t deserve his reputation among many Americans as “the worst president...
View ArticleA Taboo That Doesn’t Take 2
If you spend much of your time inspecting, testing, and diagnosing human genitalia, it’s not far to thinking about what their owners do with them. For Mels van Driel, a consultant urologist and...
View ArticleA Reloaded ‘Baffler’ Blasts Away
Last year The Baffler was thrown a lifeline, allowing the revival of the feisty but struggling journal of political, social, and cultural affairs. The publication, a favorite among many academics,...
View ArticleSmoking Out Tobacco
At a whopping 752 pages, Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition sums up all that Robert N. Proctor has discovered about the leaf he loathes. The historian of...
View ArticleWillis Barnstone: Ever More Productive
The publishing phenomenon that is Willis Barnstone is too busy to pause just because another of his books is fresh off the presses. As his The Poems of Jesus Christ, from Norton, makes its way to...
View ArticleBurn Everything, Said the Writer
Patrick White was cranky enough while alive, so will he be grumbling in his grave about what a Sydney academic and colleagues have gone and done? Last week, they published, with Knopf Australia, The...
View ArticleJohn Steinbeck: Vietnam Hawk
For admirers of John Steinbeck’s fiction, a new volume of his newspaper columns may come as a shock. Between December 1966 and May 1967 the then-64-year-old writer contributed 58 columns on the Vietnam...
View ArticleStripping as an Art Form
Judith Lynne Hanna has visited many exotic-dance clubs around the world where “I would feel comfortable dancing—if I could wear the high heels. And I was younger.” As she says so, the veteran scholar,...
View ArticleCritics Attack Closing of U. of Missouri Press
U. of Missouri President Timothy M. Wolfe At a time when university presses are arguably faring relatively well, the decision of the University of Missouri System to shut down its press has angered...
View ArticleRecalling Northrop Frye
With the final book out last week, the University of Toronto Press could not have had better timing for completion of its 30-volume Collected Works of Northrop Frye. July 14 marks the centenary of the...
View ArticleA Yawning Field of Study
Consider the exploits of Frenchman Joseph Pujol, history’s most melodic master of flatulence. Early in life, in the 1860s, he discovered a rare ability to draw air into his rectum—to use as an organ of...
View Article‘A Clockwork Orange’
Fifty years after it was published, English novelist Anthony Burgess’s disturbing A Clockwork Orange has lost little of its power. At least, that impression will soon be tested anew. Next month W.W....
View ArticleClair Willcox Is Rehired as Editor in Chief at U. of Missouri Press
Clair Willcox After a long squabble, the University of Missouri has rehired Clair Willcox, whom it laid off in July as editor in chief of the University of Missouri Press. Willcox now holds that...
View ArticleJumping Into the Field at the Deep End
As four recent books reveal, befuddling and even dangerous ethnographic research can be an engrossing read. Dashes to safety over the Siberian steppes, fearful run-ins with colonial occupiers in West...
View ArticleWhen an Issue of a Newspaper Is a Poem
Literary anthologizing is always a fraught undertaking. No two editors will find the same set of works worthy, and every anthology will—if publishers are half-smart—have plenty of potential readers,...
View Article‘Why I Resist’
In May 1942, in the wake of a Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Gordon K. Hirabayashi had no doubt that the United States government was acting unconstitutionally in imposing curfews, loyalty oaths, and...
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