Sputnik: The Shock of the Century , by Paul Dickson. Walker & Company, 310 pages, $28.
Junior-high history classes and cable-TV retrospectives have long hammered it into the head of anyone under 50 that the Soviet launch of the world’s first satellite on Oct. 4, 1957, was both an epoch-making event and a national trauma Read More
The Future of Success , by Robert Reich. Alfred A. Knopf, 289 pages, $26.
Before he became Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Labor, Robert Reich wrote an early analysis of the New Economy, The Work of Nations (1991),which gave many Americans their introduction to the globalized labor market, vagabond capital and the gap between rich and Read More
A Trial by Jury , by D. Graham Burnett. Alfred A. Knopf, 183 pages, $21.
“Just go in,” a friend once advised when I got called for jury duty, “and say, ‘I cannot be rational.’ Say, ‘I hate criminals, and if they’re arrested they’re guilty as far as I’m concerned.’ And they’ll let you go.” Read More
Next: The Future Just Happened , by Michael Lewis. W.W. Norton, 236 pages, $23.95.
“By its nature,” writes Michael Lewis in Next , “the Internet undermined anyone whose status depended on a privileged access to information.” Mr. Lewis means doctors whose patients arrive for treatment having just downloaded the last dozen issues of the Read More
The Funhouse Mirror: Reflections on Prison , by Robert Ellis Gordon and inmates of the Washington Corrections System. Washington State University Press, 110 pages, $14.95.
The Harvard-educated novelist Robert Ellis Gordon spent the 1990′s teaching fiction-writing in Washington state’s toughest jails. He seems to have learned more from his students than they learned from him. Read More
The Columnist , by Jeffrey Frank. Simon & Schuster, 237 pages, $22.
Deep into middle age, New Yorker senior editor Jeffrey Frank has squeezed out a short, clever novel. Readers might expect two things from it. First–since Mr. Frank spent years at The Washington Post and the Washington Star , and since the book’s protagonist Read More
Moral Freedom: The Search for Virtue in a World of Choice , by Alan Wolfe. W.W. Norton, 256 pages, $24.95.
“We were about halfway through another interview,” writes the Boston College sociologist Alan Wolfe early in Moral Freedom, “before it became clear that the respondent did not know what the word ‘virtue’ meant and had Read More
Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus , by Rick Perlstein. Hill and Wang, 671 pages, $30.
At the 1964 Georgia state Republican convention, the worst Presidential candidate in modern American history was offered a sip of the soft drink named after him (Gold Water–”the right drink for the conservative Read More
For Norman Birnbaum, capitalism is all stick, no carrot.
After Progress: American Social Reform and European Socialism in the Twentieth Century , by Norman Birnbaum. Oxford University Press, 432 pages, $35.
The “socialism” Norman Birnbaum extols in After Progress is what most Americans would call communism. Mr. Birnbaum, Georgetown University law pro- fessor and Read More
The Future of Success , by Robert Reich. Alfred A. Knopf, 289 pages, $26.
Before he became Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Labor, Robert Reich wrote an early analysis of the New Economy, The Work of Nations (1991),which gave many Americans their introduction to the globalized labor market, vagabond capital and the gap between rich and Read More
