EBookClubs

Read Books & Download eBooks Full Online

EBookClubs

Read Books & Download eBooks Full Online

Book Irving Howe and the Critics

Download or read book Irving Howe and the Critics written by John Rodden and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2005-01-01 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Irving Howe and the Critics is a selection of essays and reviews about the work of Irving Howe (1920?93), a vocal radical humanist and the most influential American socialist intellectual of his generation. Howe authored eighteen books, edited twenty-five more, wrote dozens of articles and reviews, and edited the magazine Dissent for forty years after founding it. His writings cover subjects ranging from U.S. labor to the vicissitudes of American communism and socialism to Yiddishkeit and contemporary politics. His book World of Our Fathers: The Journey of the East European Jews to America and the Life They Found and Made received the National Book Award for Nonfiction. ø John Rodden has chosen essays and reviews that focus on Howe?s major works and on the disputes they generated. He features both Dissent contributors and those who have dissented from the Dissenters?on the Right as well as the Left. Rodden includes a few stern assessments of Howe from his less sympathetic critics, testifying not only to the range of response?from admiration to hostility?that his work received but also to his stature on the Left as a prime intellectual target of neoconservative fire.

Book New York Magazine

    Book Details:
  • Author :
  • Publisher :
  • Release : 1974-03-11
  • ISBN :
  • Pages : 100 pages

Download or read book New York Magazine written by and published by . This book was released on 1974-03-11 with total page 100 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New York magazine was born in 1968 after a run as an insert of the New York Herald Tribune and quickly made a place for itself as the trusted resource for readers across the country. With award-winning writing and photography covering everything from politics and food to theater and fashion, the magazine's consistent mission has been to reflect back to its audience the energy and excitement of the city itself, while celebrating New York as both a place and an idea.

Book The New York Public Intellectuals and Beyond

Download or read book The New York Public Intellectuals and Beyond written by Ethan Goffman and published by Purdue University Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 379 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Here, a variety of distinguished scholars revisit and rethink the legacy of the New York intellectuals, showing how this small, predominantly Jewish group moved from communist and socialist roots to become a primary voice of liberal humanism and, in the case of a few, to launch a new conservative movement.

Book The Literary Mafia

Download or read book The Literary Mafia written by Josh Lambert and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2022-07-26 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An investigation into the transformation of publishing in the United States from a field in which Jews were systematically excluded to one in which they became ubiquitous “From the very first page, this book is funnier and more gripping than a book on publishing has any right to be. Anyone interested in America’s intellectual or Jewish history must read this, and anyone looking for an engrossing story should.”—Emily Tamkin, author of Bad Jews In the 1960s and 1970s, complaints about a “Jewish literary mafia” were everywhere. Although a conspiracy of Jews colluding to control publishing in the United States never actually existed, such accusations reflected a genuine transformation from an industry notorious for excluding Jews to one in which they arguably had become the most influential figures. Josh Lambert examines the dynamics between Jewish editors and Jewish writers; how Jewish women exposed the misogyny they faced from publishers; and how children of literary parents have struggled with and benefited from their inheritances. Drawing on interviews and tens of thousands of pages of letters and manuscripts, The Literary Mafia offers striking new discoveries about celebrated figures such as Lionel Trilling and Gordon Lish, and neglected fiction by writers including Ivan Gold, Ann Birstein, and Trudy Gertler. In the end, we learn how the success of one minority group has lessons for all who would like to see American literature become more equitable.

Book The Long March

Download or read book The Long March written by Roger Kimball and published by Encounter Books. This book was released on 2001-06-01 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Long March, Roger Kimball, the author of Tenured Radicals, shows how the "cultural revolution" of the 1960s and '70s took hold in America, lodging in our hearts and minds, and affecting our innermost assumptions about what counts as the good life. Kimball believes that the counterculture transformed high culture as well as our everyday life in terms of attitudes toward self and country, sex and drugs, and manners and morality. Believing that this dramatic change "cannot be understood apart from the seductive personalities who articulated its goals," he intersperses his argument with incisive portraits of the life and thought of Allen Ginsberg, Norman Mailer, Timothy Leary, Susan Sontag, Eldridge Cleaver and other "cultural revolutionaries" who made their mark. For all that has been written about the counterculture, until now there has not been a chronicle of how this revolutionary movement succeeded and how its ideas helped provoke today's "culture wars." The Long March fills this gap with a compelling and well-informed narrative that is sure to provoke discussion and debate.

Book The Unexamined Orwell

Download or read book The Unexamined Orwell written by John Rodden and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2012-08-17 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A reflection on Orwell-as-idea that “outlines some of the misconceptions and misuses of the Orwell name” (Modern Fiction Studies). The year 1984 is just a memory, but the catchwords of George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four still routinely pepper public discussions of topics ranging from government surveillance and privacy invasion to language corruption and bureaucratese. Orwell’s work pervades the cultural imagination, while others of his literary generation are long forgotten. Exploring this astonishing afterlife has become the scholarly vocation of John Rodden, who is now the leading authority on the reception, impact, and reinvention of George Orwell—the man and writer—as well as of “Orwell” the cultural icon and historical talisman. In The Unexamined Orwell, Rodden delves into dimensions of Orwell’s life and legacy that have escaped the critical glare. He discusses how several leading American intellectuals have earned the title of Orwell’s “successor,” including Lionel Trilling, Dwight Macdonald, Irving Howe, Christopher Hitchens, and John Lukacs. He then turns to Germany and focuses on the role and relevance of Nineteen Eighty-Four in the now-defunct communist nation of East Germany. Rodden also addresses myths that have grown up around Orwell’s life, including his “more than half-legendary” encounter with Ernest Hemingway in liberated Paris in March 1945, and analyzes literary issues such as his utopian sensibility and his prose style. Finally, Rodden poses the endlessly debated question, “What would George Orwell do?” and speculates about how the prophet of Nineteen Eighty-Four would have reacted to world events. In so doing, Rodden shows how our responses to this question reveal much about our culture’s ongoing need to reappropriate “Orwell.”

Book The Intellectual Species

    Book Details:
  • Author : John Rodden
  • Publisher : Cambridge Scholars Publishing
  • Release : 2022-01-17
  • ISBN : 1527579603
  • Pages : 395 pages

Download or read book The Intellectual Species written by John Rodden and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2022-01-17 with total page 395 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the prospects for survival of what we have come to know as “the intellectual” in the post-Gutenberg age. It addresses the contemporary history of this “species” spawned in the print age, meditating on the precarious future of international intellectual life in the digital era of nanosecond soundbites, fake news, smart phones, and clicks and scrolls in lieu of reading. The book ponders these issues as it addresses the examples of a diverse group of British, American, French, and German intellectuals of the post- World War II era. These “case histories” showcase concretely the “state of the culture” in the context of particular lives, offering diverse intellectual portraiture featuring a wide range of writers across the ideological spectrum. The key family resemblance of these figures is that most of them are contrarians, regardless of whether they were freelance writers or academic intellectuals, American or British or European, and chiefly imaginative writers or non-fiction writers and scholars. Among the intellectuals discussed are George Orwell, Dwight Macdonald, Irving Howe, Camille Paglia, Albert Camus, Robert Havemann, and others. Regardless of which intellectual domains occupied their energies, the histories of all of them yield insight into the transformation of cultural life in recent decades and the contrasting challenges faced by intellectuals of earlier eras versus our own. These issues are of paramount significance for all those who care about the life of the mind and the future of homo sapiens.

Book Reviewing Political Criticism

Download or read book Reviewing Political Criticism written by Elisabeth K. Chaves and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-08 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reviewing Political Criticism examines the rise of the ’review’ form of journal publication, from the early eighteenth to the early twenty-first centuries. The review belongs to a long tradition of written political criticism that first advised, then revised, and with the increased confidence afforded to civil society by the rise of market capitalism, subsequently challenged and even transformed the state’s view on what and how it governed. Chaves investigates the crucial nexus of intellectual debate with political judgment over this time, and highlights the review’s central role in upholding this connection. Focusing upon critical moments that required the exercise of political judgment, the book explains this journal form as a means of political practice, one that essentially ’re-views’ the state’s view of how society should be ordered. To understand critical activity, one must reflect on where this activity takes place-on the institutions of criticism that sustain it. Referred to by some as the ’natural habitat’ of intellectuals, journals, as the institutionalized sites of theoretical discourse, are often overlooked. This groundbreaking book offers a concentrated critique of the review form of journal publication as a medium for political thought and action, as a decisive site for political judgment by the state’s conservers and critics.

Book Irving Howe

Download or read book Irving Howe written by Gerald Sorin and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2005-04 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An electronic book accessible through the World Wide Web; click to view.

Book Apocalypse Then

    Book Details:
  • Author : Robert R. Tomes
  • Publisher : NYU Press
  • Release : 1998-10-01
  • ISBN : 0814783406
  • Pages : 298 pages

Download or read book Apocalypse Then written by Robert R. Tomes and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 1998-10-01 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Prior to the Vietnam war, American intellectual life rested comfortably on shared assumptions and often common ideals. Intellectuals largely supported the social and economic reforms of the 1930s, the war against Hitler's Germany, and U.S. conduct during the Cold War. By the early 1960s, a liberal intellectual consensus existed. The war in Southeast Asia shattered this fragile coalition, which promptly dissolved into numerous camps, each of which questioned American institutions, values, and ideals. Robert R. Tomes sheds new light on the demise of Cold War liberalism and the development of the New Left, and the steady growth of a conservatism that used Vietnam, and anti-war sentiment, as a rallying point. Importantly, Tomes provides new evidence that neoconservatism retreated from internationalism due largely to Vietnam, only to regroup later with substantially diminished goals and expectations. Covering vast archival terrain, Apocalypse Then stands as the definitive account of the impact of the Vietnam war on American intellectual life.

Book Running Commentary

Download or read book Running Commentary written by Benjamin Balint and published by PublicAffairs. This book was released on 2010-06-01 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the years of cultural and political ferment following World War II, a new generation of Jewish- American writers and thinkers arose to make an indelible mark on American culture. Commentary was their magazine; the place where they and other politically sympathetic intellectuals—Hannah Arendt, Saul Bellow, Lionel Trilling, Alfred Kazin, James Baldwin, Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, Cynthia Ozick and many others—shared new work, explored ideas, and argued with each other. Founded by the offspring of immigrants, Commentary began life as a voice for the marginalized and a feisty advocate for civil rights and economic justice. But just as American culture moved in its direction, it began—inexplicably to some—to veer right, becoming the voice of neoconservativism and defender of the powerful. This lively history, based on unprecedented access to the magazine's archives and dozens of original interviews, provocatively explains that shift while recreating the atmosphere of some of the most exciting decades in American intellectual life.

Book Prodigal Sons

    Book Details:
  • Author : Alexander Bloom
  • Publisher : Oxford University Press
  • Release : 1986-04-17
  • ISBN : 9780195345407
  • Pages : 480 pages

Download or read book Prodigal Sons written by Alexander Bloom and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1986-04-17 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A herd of independent minds," Harold Roseberg once labelled his fellow intellectuals. They were, and are, as this book shows, a special and fascinating group, including literary critics like Lionel Trilling, Alfred Kazin, Irving Howe, Leslie Fiedler, Philip Rahv, and William Phillips; social scientists like Nathan Glazer; art critics and historians Clement Greenberg, Harold Rrosenberg, and Meyer Schapiro; novelist Saul Bellow; and political journalists Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz. Their story winds through nearly all of the crucial intellectual and political events of the last decades, as well as through the major academic institutions of the nation and the editorial boards of such important journals as Partisan Review, Commentary, Dissent, The Public Interest, and The New York Review of Books. So deeply entrenched in our intellectual establishment are these people that it's easy to forget that most grew up onthe edge of American society--poor, Jewish, the children of immigrants. Prodigal Sons retraces their common past, from their New York City ghetto upbringing and education at Columbia and City College through their radicalization in the '30s to their preeminence in the postwar literary and academic world. The book examines their youthful efforts to ignore their Jewish heritage and their later rediscovery of this heritage in the wake of the Holocaust. It shows how they moved toward the liberal center during the Cold War and how the group fragmented in the 1960s, when some turned toward the right, becoming key figures in the Neo-Conservative movement of the 1970s and '80s. As Bloom points out, there is no single typical New York intellectual; nor did they share all their ideas. This book is concerned with how the community came to be formed, and what it thought important, how and why it moved and changed, and why it ultimately came undone. We learn some of the ways in which intellectuals function and justify their own places and a great deal about the political and cultural landscape over which New York intellectuals passed. A fascinating portrait of New York intellectual life over the past half-century ·Based on interviews with many of the leading figures and 10 years of extensive research ·Takes us behind the scenes at Commentary, Partisan Review, The Public Interest and other influential publications

Book War and the Ivory Tower

    Book Details:
  • Author : David L. Schalk
  • Publisher : U of Nebraska Press
  • Release : 2005-01-01
  • ISBN : 9780803293434
  • Pages : 298 pages

Download or read book War and the Ivory Tower written by David L. Schalk and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2005-01-01 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In War and the Ivory Tower, David L. Schalk explores the public role of the intellectual in times of national crisis. He compares American responses to the Vietnam War with French responses to the Algerian War, finding many similarities in the way intellectuals voiced their outrage at the policies of their governments. At a time when national crises abound but protest is out of fashion, and intellectuals are possibly a dying species, this book presents a needed reexamination of what it means for intellectuals to speak out on issues of international importance.

Book Intellectuals and the American Presidency

Download or read book Intellectuals and the American Presidency written by Tevi Troy and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2002 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Intellectuals and the American Presidency examines the complex relationships between Presidents and America's intellectuals since 1960. From Arthur Schlesinger's work in John Kennedy's campaign and administration to Daniel Patrick Moynihan's role as the Democrat in the Nixon White House, through Sidney Blumenthal's efforts to secure intellectual support for a scandal-plagued Bill Clinton, every president since 1960 has had to address the question of intellectual support. Using both popular sources and some never before used archived material, Intellectuals and the American Presidency looks at the advisers who served as liaisons to the academic community, the presidents' views of those intellectuals and how they fit in with the presidents' plans. In this bipartisan study, political insider Tevi Troy analyzes how American presidents have used intellectuals to shape their images and advance their agendas.

Book Norman Podhoretz and Commentary Magazine

Download or read book Norman Podhoretz and Commentary Magazine written by Nathan Abrams and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2011-10-27 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What does the term "neoconservative" mean? Who are we talking about and where did they come from? Abrams answers those very questions through a detailed and critical study of neoconservatism's leading thinker, Norman Podhoretz, and the magazine he edited for 35 years, Commentary. Podhoretz has been described as "the conductor of the neocon orchestra" and through Commentary Podhoretz powerfully shaped neoconservatism. Rich in research, the book is based upon a wide range of sources, including archival and other material never before published in the context of Commentary magazine, including Podhoretz's private papers. It argues that much of what has been said about neoconservatism is the product of willful distortion and exaggeration both by the neoconservatives themselves and their many enemies. From this unique perspective, Abrams examines the origins, rise, and fall of neoconservatism. In understanding Podhoretz, a figure often overlooked, this book sheds light on the origins, ideas, and intellectual pedigree of neoconservatism.

Book Encyclopedia of American Literature

Download or read book Encyclopedia of American Literature written by Manly, Inc. and published by Infobase Learning. This book was released on 2013-06 with total page 4512 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Susan Clair Imbarrato, Carol Berkin, Brett Barney, Lisa Paddock, Matthew J. Bruccoli, George Parker Anderson, Judith S.