August 2011

  by Barbara Alpern Engel I have always been fascinated by the personal dimensions of social and historical change, but never have been able to explore them as broadly, deeply and intimately as I am able to do in Breaking the Ties that Bound. The project began with a...

Arvind Kejriwal, photograph by Joe Athialy From Caravan: Shortly after Anna Hazare broke his fast-unto-death on 9 April, a group of young people encircled a small man with a black moustache at Jantar Mantar and began shouting the famous pre-independence slogan: Inquilab Zindabad! (Long Live Revolution!). He continued walking...

by Daniel Green The sheer bulk of Ron Silliman’s The Alphabet, as well as its apparently arbitrary structural principle, could initially leave the impression it deliberately defies reading. The same could be said of the larger project, the “life work” in progress and of which The Alphabet is a...

Jane Avril at the Jardin de Paris, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, 1893 From The Smart Set: In May of 1894, a young anarchist named Emile Henry travelled from his small apartment in Montmartre to the fashionable boulevards near the Gare Saint-Lazare in Paris. Unemployed and angry, he entered the elegant...

Fishing boat salvage year overflowing after collapse of salmon stock. Noyo, Fort Bragg, 2007 by Linda Ivey The Left Coast: California on the Edge, by Philip L. Fradkin, Berkeley: University of California Press, 115 pp. Of the many images of California that have captured the national imagination, few are...

The Play of the Eyes reviewed by John Gray

New Statesman

Crowds fascinated Canetti, so much so that he was inclined to explain the whole of history through them. In The Play of the Eyes, the last of three volumes of...

by Richard M. Cook I discovered Alfred Kazin’s journals in the summer of 1984. I was researching a book on American public criticism, criticism written for the reading public, or what Virginia Woolf called the “common reader,” rather than for academics. Kazin was one of the critics I wanted...

Canada Reads, 2010 by Steven W. Beattie Anyone who doubts the pernicious cultural impact of American Idol need look no farther than the CBC’s books coverage. Simon Fuller’s venture into prime-time karaoke was in effect nothing more than an update of the cheesy 1980s’ TV talent show Star Search,...

Green Guy, Pete Mandik, 2003.  Photograph by Rachelle Mandik by Eric Schwitzgebel Many philosophers consider the era of “modern” philosophy to begin with René Descartes’s Discourse on Method (1637) and Meditations on First Philosophy (1641). In these works, Descartes aims to ground human knowledge of the external, material world – the...