Eleanor Roosevelt: Volume Two, 1933-1938 by Blanche Wiesen Cook Viking, 1999, 696 pp., $34.95 In divorce court, lawyers and judges often hear amazingly different stories about a marriage that has long disintegrated. In history, as well, there are also his …
Vietnam, The Necessary War by Michael Lind The Free Press, 1999 314 pp. $25 Michael Lind has written five books and edited another in just four years. Vietnam, The Necessary War makes that count at least one too many. This …
When Marshall Berman laments the decline of critical culture in America, he omits the implied and crucial qualifier: democratic. For there is no shortage of critical culture on the right, where free-market radicals inveigh against the remnants of state power …
The doctors of E.R., the lawyers of Ally McBeal, the teenagers of Dawson’s Creek. This year, as last, ensemble casts dominate television’s leading programs. The newest ensemble cast is, however, different from the others. It consists of a fictional president …
Martha and la Shadow are talking about sex. Martha is sitting beside me on the steps of a suburban apartment complex in San Salvador with her four-month-old baby girl in her lap. La Shadow sits across from us in a …
“Some books refuse to go away. They get shot out of the water but surface again and remain afloat,” Charles Kindleberger, the economic historian, wrote about Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time twenty-five …
E.J. Dionne The story is told of Mrs. O’Reilly being taken to the polls on Election Day by her son. She has always voted Democratic. Her son, a member of the upper middle class, votes for lots of Republicans. He …
Our country lacks critical culture today, brooks little questioning of “how human beings should live and what our life means.” So argues Marshall Berman in his remarks opening the symposium in this issue. We need, he proposes, some “jaytalking.” But …
It’s difficult to cook without a recipe. Marshall Berman offers a three part one: powerful and provocative ideas, smart and imaginative people, and experimental neighborhoods where these people and ideas can interact. It sounds good, and I think Berman is …
Instead of critical culture, “struggl[ing] actively over how human beings should live,” we have a pale culture of critics. Censorship is a permanent irritation but serious-minded people (who can also be joyful, why not?) need to face up to the …
Marshall Berman sees in the incoherence of a punk culture the same potential that Marx once thought he saw in the rising consciousness of a proletarian movement: the coming “negation” of the capitalist order. But neither the street youths of …
The August 1998 financial crash and its aftermath shattered all conventional schemes for explaining Russian postcommunism. The latter can hardly be viewed any longer as an instance of “modernization” or “transition” (however hazardous) from something blameworthy or undeveloped to something …
Anyone old enough to remember gas lines, Love Canal, or Three Mile Island will recall a time when the environmental movement focused mainly on domestic issues. To be sure, the idea of a fragile planet was always part of the …
An American Love Story, a cinema verité treatment of an interracial family in Queens, aired for five nights on the Public Broadcasting System in mid-September. Compared to the documentary about the Loud family shown twenty-five years ago, this exercise in …
You’re sitting there reading Dissent in the new millennium and I’m sitting here at the end of September 1999 with carte blanche from the editors: “Say what you like.” Easy enough for them—but what happened on the way to 2000? …
