John Moncure Daniel was ever quick to attack what he saw as wrong. He minced no words during the seven years he spent as a top American diplomat, including a moment which may have deeply affected the history of Italy. Subsequently, Daniel...
In The Beauty of Inflections, Jerome J. McGann sounds a compelling call for “socio-historical” criticism of literature. His book addresses Keats, Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade,” and the...
Many times each year the reviewer is called upon to answer the question “Do we really need yet another book about the Civil War?” Surprisingly often the answer is a tentative “Yes!” Considerable stores of new information are assembled into...
Norcross, 37, is not hardhearted. It’s only that if you operate a drawbridge on a navigable waterway in the United States, the First Commandment is unambiguous: thou shalt open the bridge when the ship gets there. You don’t ask the ship to...
In her highly acclaimed first book, Praying for Sheetrock, Melissa Fay Greene focused on a little known patch of the large and complex quilt that is the Southern civil rights movement. She peopled it with characters who were both courageous...
It frequently happens that an artist who has had enormous prestige during his lifetime suffers a temporary decline in his reputation after his death. T. S. Eliot is the perfect example.
The past quarter century has witnessed a major shift in the structures of American politics, often characterized as the passing of “the New Deal order.” G. Edward White’s superb new book The Constitution and the New Deal is a monument to...
