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On the Side of the Angels: An Appreciation of Parties & Parti by Nancy L. Rosenblum
Welcome to the Party
A review by Paul Starr
Partisanship is resurgent in America, and hardly anyone likes it. To say that American politics has become polarized along party lines is tantamount, for most people, to acknowledging that something has gone wrong with the country. And, indeed, the differences between Republicans and Democrats are less easily bridged than in the past: the two parties now stand for different worldviews, not just different policy positions. The divergence between the parties is not just a phenomenon of election time. In Congress, liberal-to-moderate Republicans and conservative Democrats have nearly...
The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House During the Cuban Missile Crisis by Ernest R. May
What JFK Really Said
A review by Sheldon M. Stern
[Ed. note: This review originally ran in the May 2000 issue of the Atlantic Monthly]. My twenty-three years as the historian at the John F. Kennedy Library, in Boston, were punctuated by intensive work on sound recordings. I conducted scores of taped oral-history interviews and verified the accuracy of the transcripts, edited President John F. Kennedy's recorded telephone conversations, and, in 1981-1982, evaluated tapes made during the Cuban missile crisis, in October of 1962, as the library prepared for their declassification. The work was fascinating and exhilarating, but the poor...
A Nuclear Family Vacation: Travels in the World of Atomic Weaponry by Nathan Hodge
Armageddon Tourism
A review by Hugh Gusterson
In their new book, A Nuclear Family Vacation, Nathan Hodge and Sharon Weinberger quote Tom Vanderbilt's aphorism that "all wars end in tourism." Because World War III may leave no tourists behind, Hodge and Weinberger, a husband-and-wife journalistic team, wisely decide to get their nuclear tourism in beforehand by visiting nuclear sites in 10 U.S. states and 5 countries. The idea that they are tourists is something of a conceit, though: They visit many sites that would be closed to the rest of us, prepare for road trips by reading government reports rather than Fodor's travel guides, and...
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AIDS Sutra: Untold Stories from India by Amartya (frw) Sen
Essayists Reveal a Culture of Repression and Shame.
A review by Charles Solomon
Reporting in the American media on the spread of AIDS has focused on Africa. Yet India, with its enormous population, its grinding poverty juxtaposed with rapidly growing wealth and its distinctive attitudes toward sex, has become an epicenter of the disease. Since the onset of the AIDS pandemic, ignorance and prejudice have been the virus' greatest allies -- and the most frustrating impediments to care and prevention programs. AIDS Sutra: Untold Stories From India, an intelligent, often compelling collection of essays by noted Indian writers, demonstrates that workers on the subcontinent...
American Lightning: Terror, Mystery, the Birth of Hollywood, and the Crime of the Century by Howard Blum
How They Blew Up the L.A. Times
A review by Russell Baker
During the half-century between Lincoln and Woodrow Wilson, class warfare in the United States was always robust, usually ferocious, and often homicidal. Since the moneyed class controlled most of the heavy weapons -- courts, state militias, municipal police forces, banks, newspapers, governors, senators, and often even the presidency -- it won most of the battles and naturally ended up owning the lion's share of the national wealth. Constantly triumphant, the rich became dangerously pleased with their own excellence and ostentatiously arrogant. Frederick Townsend Martin, who wrote as a ...
Culture Clash: Dread Meets Punk Rockers by Don Letts
Dead at the Controls
A review by Gerry Donaghy
You may not know who Don Letts is, but you've probably felt his impact in a variety of ways. As a film director, he has directed documentaries on punk rock and music videos by the likes of The Clash, The Pretenders, and Elvis Costello. As a tastemaker, he bridged racial differences and helped shaped the political and musical consciousness of young punks like Johnny Rotten and Joe Strummer by turning them onto reggae. In Culture Clash: Dread Meets Punk Rockers, Letts tells his life story. Born in London to Jamaican immigrants, Letts got his first real taste of the glamorous life when he...
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