I’ve been invited to try brevity for a change in this space; and it seemed like a novel idea. So here’s a brief aperture on the past. Last fall, I was campaigning for Barack Obama in the northern suburbs of Philadelphia. I was deep inside enemy territory, and I knew it.
Read moreBaseball: What's Foul Ain't Fair →
It’s April and baseball is back: time for memories and hopes to burden and blur our sense of reality and the here-and-now. Baseball is a link to the past, including the personal past: a line drive leading straight back to childhood. I am reminded of this by an incident that occurred exactly a year ago.
Read moreBook Reviewing →
I began my writing life several decades ago as a book reviewer, but I’ve largely kicked the habit. It isn’t that reviewing isn’t important or interesting; it is a vital democratic conversation about books, journalism, ideas, and imagination. As a young aspiring writer I fell into it easily, maybe too easily. But after reviewing a few score volumes as I have tried to do -- carefully, generously, critically -- one tends to get a bit of genre fatigue. One tires of praising and of scolding. And having written a couple of books myself, and seen them (fairly and unfairly) praised and scolded, the urge to judge others diminishes even further.
Read moreShall We Overcome? →
At a time of unprecedented national pride and renewal, as we approach the inauguration of America’s first nonwhite president, it’s hard to imagine anything more squalid than the behavior of the president-elect’s home-state governor, Rod Blagojovich of Illinois, who was arrested Nov. 12th on charges of conspiring to sell Mr. Obama’s own seat in the U.S. Senate. Nothing could be more distracting or at odds with the spirit of the moment. Or so it seemed.
Gov. Blagojovich will of course have the day in court to which he is entitled -- followed, most likely, by many years of incarceration. But from the standpoint of racial harmony and conciliation, which is a key subtext of the past election, the present time, and the coming administration, I would single out another chapter of this story for its inappropriateness: something less despicable than what Gov. Blagojovich allegedly did, but in a way, more depressing. That is the reaction of some African-American leaders in Illinois and in Congress, to the Governor’s nomination of a distinguished black politician, Roland Burris, to fill Obama’s Senate seat.
Blagojovich remains governor as of this writing, with the powers pertaining to that office. He himself claims to have a legal duty to fill the seat; duty or not, his nomination of Burris is perfectly legal.
The problem is that the governor is so deeply compromised, not just by the charges pending against him but by the nationally-publicized recordings of some particularly damning evidence for those charges, that any act he performs in his remaining time as governor bears the taint of corruption.
Read moreThe Fog of War at the Book Fair →
I am a book collector and have a weakness for modern first editions, although many of these are no longer in my price range (or that of anyone I know). And so, on a Saturday morning last April, I dropped by the Park Avenue Armory, site of the New York Antiquarian Book Fair, hoping to simply say hello to a few dealer friends, peruse the books quickly, and get back home in time to catch the Mets-Braves game. As it happened, I found a nice copy of Kurt Vonnegut’s anti-war masterpiece, Slaughterhouse-Five. But what really interested me was a rather incongruous sideshow, also with a wartime theme.
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