Twice a finalist for the Pulitzer, H.W. Brands, in Reagan: The Life, describes the 40th president as a conservative Franklin Roosevelt. What Roosevelt was to the “first half of the twentieth century, Reagan was to the second half.” The description occurs with enough frequency to become a recurring theme. A short chapter at the book’s...
“Time,” R.H. Ives Gammell wrote in The Twilight of Painting, “is a ruthless appraiser of art and, by and large, a very just one.” Gammell addressed his book “to readers disposed to consider the complete deterioration of the older forms of painting a disaster to civilization.” When he published The Twilight in 1946, Gammell’s purpose...
In the seventy-seventh of The Dream Songs, John Berryman writes, “these fierce & airy occupations, and love, / raved away so many of Henry’s years.” The pervasive tone of Berryman’s life and writing, spanning the tired, mad, and lonely years from 1914 to 1972, is that of religious despair; somber and violent, the emphasis is...