Dreams from Obama
By Darryl Pinckney
On a surprisingly mild January afternoon in Harlem, the day of the Democratic primary in New Hampshire, my barber predicted that Senator Barack Obama would win by a landslide. He shut off his clippers and took the floor. "We need to pull for him. I'm sick of people saying, 'They'll never elect a black president.'"
The Nerve and the Will
By Sanford Schwartz
For those of us who have followed Julian Schnabel's larger-than-life career as an artist for nearly thirty years, watching his new movie The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is a doubly extraordinary experience. It is a film that presents a nightmarish and almost unbearable medical case history that has been handled with humor, a lyrical deftness, and a remarkable absence of sentimentality; and if you have more than a passing sense of Schnabel the person and his work as a painter, your mind is running at the same time on a parallel track, one full of amazement and almost disbelief that, with no apparent training in theater arts or the directing of actors, or even a feeling for photography, he has turned himself into a sometime moviemaker of such drive and sensitivity.
The Greatest Threat to Us All
By Joseph Cirincione
On Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race by Richard Rhodes, and three other books.
The Way to All Flesh
By Julian Bell
On Lucian Freud by William Feaver, Freud at Work: Lucian Freud in Conversation with Sebastian Smee by Bruce Bernard and David Dawson, and Lucian Freud: The Painter's Etchings an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art.
Look Homeward, Angel
By J.M. Coetzee
On Lost Paradise by Cees Nooteboom.
One Angry Man
By Brian Urquhart
On Surrender Is Not an Option: Defending America at the United Nations and Abroad by John Bolton.
The Musical Mystery
By Colin McGinn
On Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain by Oliver Sacks.
He Went Against the Peace Pipe
By Larry McMurtry
On Custerology: The Enduring Legacy of the Indian Wars and George Armstrong Custer by Michael A. Elliott.
Plus: Edmund White on Howard Sturgis, Jeremy Waldron on Michael Walzer, Richard Horton on the war on cancer, Helen Vendler on Charles Wright, Robert O. Paxton on The Hunt for Nazi Spies, and more.
