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Of all the great actors from the golden age of silent-screen comedy, only Charlie Chaplin has retained some of the iconic status he enjoyed in his heyday, when he was [...]

Of all the great actors from the golden age of silent-screen comedy, only Charlie Chaplin has retained some of the iconic status he enjoyed in his heyday, when he was [...]

Pragmatism and politics - for most people this phrase states a natural enough connection. Politics, after all, is the 'art of the possible,' involving the necessity of practical compromise, and [...]

By Don DeLillo Scribner. 827 pp. $27.50 Reviewed by Daniel J. Silver AFTER A long, wearying preoccupation with 'minimalism,' it seems that American fiction has begun to return to more [...]

It is a truth universally acknowledged that Americans are an incorrigibly religious people: the overwhelming majority say they believe in God, and most attend houses of worship with some regularity. [...]

It is a truth universally acknowledged that Americans are an incorrigibly religious people: the overwhelming majority say they believe in God, and most attend houses of worship with some regularity. [...]

By John Baxter HarperCollins. 457 pp. $25.00 Reviewed by Daniel J. Silver During the 1930's and 40's, the heyday of the American movie business, film production was dominated by the [...]

By Joseph McBride Simon & Schuster. $28 pp. $30.00 During the 1930's and 40's, the heyday of the American movie business, film production was dominated by the studio system. Everyone, [...]

During the 1970's and 80's there were frequent reports in the press on the activities of an American businessman with the improbable name of Armand Hammer. The chairman of Occidental [...]

The good news is that today, more than three decades after his death, at least a couple of James Thurber's books can be found in the humor sections of bookstores. [...]

There is no dearth these days of books and articles decrying the overwhelming complexity of our legal system, and if the success of Philip K. Howard's The Death of Common [...]

AN ODD disjunction today affects our experience of the movies. On the one hand, never have films been so accomplished, so technically glossy. On the other, they just do not [...]

SURELY for anyone born after World War II, the staccatotoned voice of the narrator of the television series The Untouchables is more familiar than the name of the man behind [...]

AS HAS been recorded in dispiriting detail by numerous observers, the wholesale embrace of multiculturalism in our universities has mainly led not to an opening-up of the curriculum to other [...]

Oscar Levant is remembered chiefly for two things: his recordings of classical piano music - particularly the works of his friend George Gershwin - and his appearances as a lovably [...]

By G. Edward White. Oxford. 628 pp. $37.50. Oliver Wendell Holmes is customarily called America's greatest jurist, but outside of the legal profession few today can be aware of his [...]

By STANLEY FISH. Oxford. 332pp. $25.00. Reviewed by DANIEL J. SILVER STANLEY FISH, a professor at Duke University is a famous Milton scholar who has also written a great deal [...]

by Steven Watts Houghton Mifflin, 526 pp. $30.00 Walt Disney may have been immodest, but he was not exaggerating when in the early 1960's he offered an assessment of his [...]

Politics and humor have been bedfellows forever. But the pairing of conservatism and humor has struck some - particularly liberals - as faintly oxymoronic. In part, this prejudice must derive [...]

ESCALATING to another level of both rhetorical overkill and all-out futurism is the latest book by Alvin and Heidi Toffler, Creating a New Civilization: The Politics of the Third Wave.(2) [...]

ASIDE from their worries over the economic and social arenas, some doomsayers also question what is happening to culture as a result of the growth of new technologies. Books on [...]

Martha Bayles, a former television and arts critic for the Wall Street Journal, here tells the troubled story of American popular music. Her title comes from a blues lyric which [...]

Probably the most entertaining of the realist books is a set of musings by Clifford Stoll entitled, aptly, Silicon Snake Oil.(7) Stoll is an astronomer who became world-famous with his [...]

On the agitprop front, however, Rifkin is a rank amateur compared with Kirkpatrick Sale, who in his latest screed, Rebels Against the Future: The Luddites and Their War on the [...]

AND so we come to the sober realists. First up is Thomas K. Landauer in The Trouble With Computers.(6) As a corrective to techno-utopianism, this book is to be heartily [...]

LET us turn now to the doomsayers. As I indicated above, they, at least, take the hype of the technoboosters seriously, if not completely at face value. Thus, according to [...]

THE smell of money is never far from the pages of Being Digital,(1) the best-selling work of our first technobooster, Nicholas Negroponte, founding director of MIT's Media Lab and columnist [...]