Reader, Writer
May 1, 2009 | Washington Monthly
Leonard Bernstein took a lot of flak for his antics on the podium. Patrons of the New York Philharmonic at mid-century were either delighted or appalled to catch a glimpse of the “Lenny leap,” an uncouth maneuver that found the enthusiastic maestro a good foot in the air before a momentous downbeat. A newspaper critic complained …
April 30, 2009 | The Barnes & Noble Review
If a single dish could be said to embody the very pinnacle of man’s decadence, vanity, and moral ruin, it would be Pâté de foie gras de Strasbourg. This French specialty is made of a whole goose liver — unnaturally fattened to many times its normal size through force-feedings — wrapped in veal, the tender …
April 21, 2009 | The Barnes & Noble Review
What distinguishes friendship between two people from friendship between a human and an animal? There are the drinking games, of course. And human friends also offer each other more complex reciprocal qualities (humor, shared experience, perspective) than humans and animals do (patience, dependability, loyalty). But more than that, admiration seems to be a subtly important …
April 8, 2009 | The Nation
An outstanding history of women’s struggle for equality through the courts and in the legal profession. A colleague of mine recently argued an important civil rights case before the Supreme Court. In the hectic days before she left for Washington, as she reread every relevant decision and practiced clearing her throat, her attention was diverted …
April 1, 2009 | San Francisco Chronicle
How a Band of Survivors and a Young Spy Agency Chased Down the World’s Most Notorious Nazi Never underestimate the stupidity of criminals. Even war criminals. After Adolf Eichmann, the bureaucratic overseer of the Final Solution, escaped from Europe after World War II, he settled down in a Buenos Aires neighborhood that was known to …
March 1, 2009 | The Nation
Don’t ask, don’t tell is on its way out, and not a moment too soon. One of the ugliest moments of the 2008 presidential campaign involved a room full of people booing a gay general. During the Republican CNN/YouTube debate in November 2007, retired Brigadier General Keith Kerr asked a question by video. In a …
December 31, 2008 | The Barnes & Noble Review
God bless contrarians. When the chumps in the audience start clapping on the downbeat, it’s the contrarians who score one for hipness by hitting the backbeat; roving around like members of some cerebral street gang, they buck trends, scorn fashions — always smirking — and generally look for a thinker’s scrap where first principles can …
November 26, 2008 | San Francisco Chronicle
An old Chicago joke has President Kennedy, Premier Khrushchev and Mayor Richard J. Daley as the only passengers on a sinking boat with one life jacket. Kennedy and Khrushchev each claim the jacket, the former as the leader of the free world, the latter as the head of the communist revolution. Daley, that Irish Catholic …
November 15, 2008 | Bookforum
American legal education holds few horrors greater than the wooze-inducing editorial content that pads casebooks on constitutional law. The notes that follow court opinions are either so deadly simple or so impenetrably dense as to frighten law students into pushing their casebooks somewhere to the back of their computer desks so as to plunge into …
October 20, 2008 | The Barnes & Noble Review
This breezy, gossipy, beautifully written book traces the early life of the writer Roald Dahl as he made the rounds and unmade the beds in 1940s Washington as one of His Majesty’s dashing spies. Intent on bringing the United States into World War Two, England established a clandestine agency called British Security Coordination, which undercut …
October 12, 2008 | San Francisco Chronicle
Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy Book dedications, while intensely meaningful to their recipients, are usually too simple and private to be more than vaguely poignant to the average reader. “To Véra,” wrote Nabokov at the beginning of “Lolita.” “To Annalena,” begin several of Ian McEwan‘s novels. How lovely, one thinks, before …
August 17, 2008 | San Francisco Chronicle
In the little commonwealth of books about the personal journeys behind great Supreme Court cases, “Gideon’s Trumpet” is king and lord protector. The book tells, in stirring and unabashedly majestic tones, the story of Gideon vs. Wainwright, the 1963 case in which the court unanimously announced that indigent criminal defendants have a constitutional right to …