The subject is the Vietnam War. Dispatches (1977) reports remarkable front-line encounters with an acid-dazed infantryman who can’t wait to get back into the field and add Viet Cong kills to his long list (‘I just can’t hack it back in the World’, he says); with a helicopter door gunner who fires indiscriminately into crowds […]
In these coolly observant essays, Joan Didion (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_Didion) looks at the American political process and at ‘that handful of insiders who invent, year in and year out, the narrative of public life’. Through the deconstruction of the sound bites and photo ops of three presidential campaigns, one presidential impeachment, and an unforgettable sex scandal, Didion reveals
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John Berger’s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Berger) Ways of Seeing (1972) is one of the most stimulating and influential books on art in any language. It was based on the BBC television series about which the Sunday Times critic commented: ‘This is an eye-opener in more ways than one: by concentrating on how we look at paintings . . .
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Homer called it a divine substance. Plato described it as especially dear to the gods. As Mark Kurlansky (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Kurlansky and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Kurlansky) so brilliantly relates here, salt has shaped civilisation from the beginning, and its story is a glittering, often surprising part of the history of mankind. Wars have been fought over salt and, while salt taxes secured
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The Nature and Destiny of Man (1943) issues a vigorous challenge to Western civilization to understand its roots in the faith of the Bible, particularly the Hebraic tradition. The growth, corruption, and purification of the important Western emphases on individuality are insightfully chronicled here. This book is arguably Reinhold Niebuhr’s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinhold_Niebuhr and http://niebuhrsociety.typepad.com/) most important work.
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Drawing on his own incarceration and exile, as well as on evidence from more than 200 fellow prisoners and Soviet archives, Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksandr_Solzhenitsyn) reveals the entire apparatus of Soviet repression, the state within the state, that ruled the lives of millions. Through truly Shakespearean portraits of its victims, men, women, and children, we encounter
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Shots rang out in Savannah’s grandest mansion in the misty, early morning hours of May 2, 1981. Was it murder or self-defence? For nearly a decade, the shooting and its aftermath reverberated throughout this hauntingly beautiful city of moss-hung oaks and shaded squares. John Berendt’s sharply observed, suspenseful, and witty narrative reads like a thoroughly engrossing novel, and
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The famous child psychologist, Bruno Bettelheim (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruno_Bettelheim), explains how fairy tales educate, support, and liberate the emotions of children. Wicked stepmothers and beautiful princesses … magic forests and enchanted towers … little pigs and big bad wolves … Fairy tales have been an integral part of childhood for hundreds of years. It’s in this book
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Saloon-keepers and street preachers, gypsies and steel-walking Mohawks, a bearded lady and a 93-year-old ‘seafoodetarian’ who believes his specialized diet will keep him alive for another two decades. These are among the people that Joseph Mitchell (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Mitchell_(writer)) immortalized in his reportage for The New Yorker and in four books McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon, Old Mr. Flood, The
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