POSTED // Jun 11,2007 - As a columnist, Joe Conason is something of a liberal wind-up toy. Twist the crank and get your 750 words of “Republican bad, Democrat good. Republican bad, Democrat good.” (Repeat as necessary.) Admittedly, that’s a pretty reductive...

POSTED // Jun 11,2007 - The high queen of literary journalism has struck again with what smells and feels like a memoir, but proves to be the sort of rambling medley of reportage, social and personal history that only Joan Didion could pull off. While Didion’s eloquent—and...

POSTED // Jun 11,2007 - Sometimes solemn, slightly precocious and perpetually self-eviscerating, the unnamed narrator of Tobias Wolff’s first novel thirsts for anointment into the American literati. But like recent bete noirs of American letters, a lust for unearned greatness...

POSTED // Jun 11,2007 - It’s a pity the Bush-bashing book genre is so dominated by screeds that have as much to do with their author’s vanity as they do with politics. Purchasing many of these titles can be more reasonably viewed as an act of political patronage...

POSTED // Jun 11,2007 - Indiana isn’t famous for cranking out cultural luminaries, though the ones it has sired are as random as anything an iPod might spew. In politics, there’s native socialist son Eugene Debs and, uh, Dan Quayle. In music it’s John Mellencamp...

POSTED // Jun 11,2007 - Liberation, invasion, occupation—whatever you want to call it, the Iraq war is now 2 years old; contain your ambivalence, please. And with the chaos, bloodshed and occasional glimmers of hope have come more than a few books. At first, the majority...

POSTED // Jun 11,2007 - With all the books that came after 9/11about the Taliban, the little tiff between Islam and the West, and countless hagiographies of all things Giulianinot a single one concerned the people who did the deed. ~~~image~~~ For all of bin Ladens financing...

POSTED // Jun 11,2007 - Like a lot of brand-name journalists, Frank Rich attracts his share of awe and loathing. Being a “cultural” critic for The New York Times, after all, is enough for an entire demographic to dislike you, if not dismiss you, on partisan principle....

POSTED // Jun 11,2007 - Last fall, film critic David Denby gushed in the New Yorker about the just-out-on-DVD Blood Diamond. Set in Sierra Leone during its horrific civil war, the film is a romantic drama about an American journalist (Jennifer Connelly) and a South African diamond...

POSTED // Jun 11,2007 - Aside from lotto tickets, it’s hard to think of a gift with a greater upside then a book. If your beloved doesn’t fall for the latest Donna Leon mystery, she can put it down after 20 minutes and a have nice piece of décor, or a gift for the...