The Horror of Dirt
Elaine Blair : Non-Fiction
Upstairs and downstairs with Virginia, Vanessa and the Bloomsbury set.
2008
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Truth and Consequences
Amy Alexander : Non-Fiction
Who's more to blame in the Love and Consequences hoax: the faux ghetto girl or the credulous book editors and reviewers who so eagerly snapped up her story?
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Chafee Chastened
Eyal Press : George W. Bush
In his recent memoir, former GOP insider Lincoln Chafee boldly decries the Bush era.
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Lives on the Ground
Adina Hoffman : Israeli/Palestinian Conflict
New memoirs from Israel and Palestine offer the chance not to escape the political conflict but to grasp the way it impacts daily life.
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The Dot Matrix
Laila Lalami : Iraq
In I'jaam: An Iraqi Rhapsody, novelist Sinan Antoon explores themes of love, loss, identity and resistance in the face of political oppression.
2007
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The Nijinsky of Ambivalence
Morris Dickstein : Peace Activism
During a Vietnam War protest, Norman Mailer blustered and banged a generation's experience through his prodigious ego.
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Judging Thomas
A close look at Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas reveals a deeply conservative and increasingly bitter man.
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ART in America
Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow : Reproductive Rights
Two new books explore the possibilities and ethical complications of assisted reproductive technology.
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Father of History
Christopher Phelps : Progressives, Liberals, & The American Left
Bettina Aptheker's recent memoir has incited fierce debate over her father s legacy.
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Frank Schaeffer Goes Crazy for God
The original poster child for the religious right describes how he came to terms with religion and an odd upbringing.
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Greenspan and the Myth of the True Believer
His autobiography sheds light on what motivates hard-right political leaders to apply brutal economic shock therapy.
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The Passenger
Andrew Rice : Journalists & Journalism
In a posthumously published memoir, Ryszard Kapuscinski looks back on his life as a pathbreaking literary journalist who covered the Third World during the cold war.
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The Doctor Stories
Atul Gawande offers up a banal self-help manual for aspiring MDs, while Pauline Chen prescribes a dose of compassion.
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Clowns With Kalashnikovs
James Miller : Public Figures & Intellectuals
In his memoir, Régis Debray describes the evolution of his politics from his early days as a revolutionary to his later work advising the nominally socialist François Mitterrand.
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The New Face of Warfare
Child soldiering has become a defining feature of modern warfare. And the United States has been all too complicit in the trend.
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The Brown Decades
In an engaging new memoir, Carolyn Brown recollects her work with modern dance legends Merce Cunningham and John Cage.
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Goodbye, Baltimore
Kate Levin : African-Americans
In a kinetic and searching memoir, Ace of Spades, David Matthews confronts the identity questions that bedeviled him growing up biracial.
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The Anatomy of Fear
In his memoir Wish I Could Be There, Allen Shawn movingly details a life crippled by phobias.
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Newspapers...and After?
Newspapers may be dinosaurs in the age of new media, but they have enough life to guide--and even define--our politics.
2006
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Faraway, So Close
In his memoir Five Germanys I Have Known, Fritz Stern revisits his family's past and finds that he has never been quite at home.
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Class Consciousness
Decca: The Letters of Jessica Mitford explores the contradictions of a social revolutionary possessed of an aristocrat's sense of the wrong and right kind of people.
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Not Dark Yet
Gore Vidal's Point to Point Navigation is a brave and continuous affirmation of life and an assurance that though the Republic has been betrayed, we are not to give up hope.
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French Lessons
The history of twentieth-century France depicts a struggle between the republican ideal of a unitary state and the shifting concerns of a pluralistic society.
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Death in the Family
Daniel Mendelsohn's The Lost represents one man's search to find the truth about himself, his family and the Holocaust.
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Unsentimental Education
Christopher Hitchens : Australia
A new memoir by Robert Hughes reveals the idiosyncratic sensibility of a celebrated art critic.
This week: Imagining a new new deal, with Howard Zinn, Frances Moore Lappe, Andrea Batista Schlesinger, Eric Schlosser and...FDR himself. Plus: Ennis Carter and Stephen Duncombe on the political propaganda legacy of the WPA. (13mb mp3)
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