An editorial in today’s New York Times states, “[President] Bush’s decision after 9/11 that he had the power to put prisoners beyond the reach of the law at his choosing was the first attempt to suspend habeas corpus on American territory since the Civil War.” It continues: The retired Justice
Richard Siken can add yet another trophy to his mantelpiece. It was announced last week that his book Crush, winner of the 2004 Yale Younger Poets prize and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry, has been included among the Spring 2006 Book Sense Picks Poetry Top
It was announced this week that Erskine Clarke’s Dwelling Place: A Plantation Epic, a narrative history of four generations of a plantation’s inhabitants–white and black–in Liberty County, Georgia, from 1805 to 1869, is among this year’s winners of the prestigious Bancroft Prize. The Bancroft Prize, established in 1948, is awarded
In the latest review of America at the Crossroads, Michiko Kakutani writes in the New York Times that Francis Fukuyama, “serves up a powerful indictment of the Bush administration’s war in Iraq and the role that neoconservative ideas — concerning preventive war, benevolent hegemony and unilateral action — played in
Slobodan Milosevic, the former Serbian leader who was on trial for crimes against humanity at the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague, died in his prison cell on Saturday, apparently from a heart attack. Known in the U.S. as “the butcher of the Balkans,” Milosevic orchestrated a decade of violence
William Wegman: Funney/Strange, the first retrospective of Wegman’s work to appear in over fifteen years, opened last week at the Brooklyn Museum. Best known and beloved for signature photographs of his troupe of weimeraners, Wegman is also an immensely important figure in the contemporary art world. The exhibition reveals the
“This book is about manliness,” begins the preface of a provocative new book by Harvey C. Mansfield, William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of Government at Harvard University. What is that? It’s best to start from examples we know: our sports heroes, too many to name; Margaret Thatcher, the British prime
Goya’s Last Works, the first exhibition in the United States to focus exclusively on the final phase of Goya’s career, opened last week at the Frick Collection in New York. According to the review of the exhibition which appeared in the New York Times, The compact Frick show is
(From Chapter 2 of America at the Crossroads by Francis Fukuyama) In the period leading up to and following the Iraq war, an enormous amount of ink was spilled on the subject of neoconservatives and their alleged capture of the Bush administration. The story is endlessly fascinating because it appears
The Art of Frederick Sommer, winner of the 2005 Golden Light Award, Book of the Year, continues to receive accolades and enthusiastic reviews in publications across the country. American Photo (Jan/Feb 2006) includes the book among the “Best Photo Books of the Year,” and says, “This hefty retrospective of Sommer’s