“The difficulty in life is the choice.” —George Moore Please excuse the personal anecdotes scattered throughout this essay. As a woman, I found it difficult to write a standard third-person review and instead drew on my own experiences and emotions in responding to this book. Rejecting rationality, logic, and “vertical” thinking, I recognized that my...
Peter Mayle has dominated the nonfiction best-seller lists in recent years with his chronicles of life in the south of France. A Year in Provence and Toujours Provence (both published in the United States in 1991) even spawned a fourpart television series, which was produced by the BBC and has run regularly on the Arts...
Andrew Lytle, in his family memoir A Wake for the Living, compares the past to a foreign country. “If we dismiss the past as dead,” he writes, “and not as a country of the living which our eyes are unable to see, as we cannot see a foreign country but know it is there, then...
Eugéne Ionesco’s death on March 28 was hardly noticed by the American press. While European newspapers ran two-page spreads on the renowned playwright—whom they variously referred to as “prince of the absurd,” “dynamiter of conformisms,” “genial dramatist,” “old child,” and “melancholy watchman”—the New York Times marked the event with only a standard obituary. But alas,...
Cigarette smoking is bad for your health. But so are automobiles, candy bars, fast food, martinis, television, and even sunshine. Since the days of James V and I, we have heard about the dangers of tobacco. So why all the fuss surrounding the cigarette industry this spring? Even more absurd than Representative Henry A. Waxman’s...
Among a people generally corrupt liberty cannot long exist. —Edmund Burke I was reading Arthur Goldhammer’s translation of Maurice Lever’s Sade as the Senator Packwood scandal raged on, and although I wouldn’t want to draw any unwarranted comparisons between the two bonhommes, the parallels between Ancien Régime France and contemporary America are unmistakable. Debauchery reigns...
Many alumni of a junior year abroad summarize their experience as “enjoyable,” “enlightening,” or even “empowering.” Others rely on their senses in recalling the niceties of life in another country: they remember the smell of warm bread wafting from a pâtisserie, the sight of a bustling and colorful Saturday-morning market, the sound of high-pitched horns...
In December 1982, Dr. Jack Yoffa of Syracuse, New York, took Zomax, a painkiller, just before driving to the hospital for minor surgery. About halfway there, Yoffa began to itch and turn red. Within 60 seconds, he was unconscious. His car hit a guardrail, crossed a three-lane highway (narrowly missing several cars), knocked over a...
Superbowl XXVII last winter was unremarkable except for Michael Jackson’s halftime extravaganza. The climax of the performance was Jackson’s “Heal the World” anthem, which he dedicated “from the children of Los Angeles to the children of the world.” Much like the early 80’s hymn “We Are the World,” which Jackson composed with Lionel Richie, “Heal...
Offering Norplant in on-site clinics at public schools in Baltimore might seem like one of those evils that is necessary or even inevitable: this is, after all, a city where one in ten girls between the ages of 15 and 17 gave birth in 1990. But the language used by the plan’s advocates reveals a...
Switzerland has resisted the forces of centralization that seem to be sweeping Europe. Last December 6, in a referendum that was widely considered the country’s most important since it established its confederation in 1848, Swiss voters rejected a plan to help form a 19-nation European Economic Area in which people, goods, capital, and services would...
The music business is the latest battleground in the p.c. war—and recent events indicate that dissident or controversial musicians have no defenders in the media establishment that now controls the industry. In yet another instance of censorship by the “free-speaking” left, singer Steve Vaus has been stifled in his efforts to “Take America Back,” even...
The Univ. of Michigan has not given up. Federal District Court Judge Avern Cohn’s August 1989 ruling that Michigan’s anti-discrimination and discriminatory harassment policy (inaugurated in April 1988) was unconstitutionally vague and overbroad merely sent administrators back to their drawing boards. After implementing an interim policy last September, University President James Duderstadt assembled three committees...