June 2006
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From 1947, when Jackie Robinson broke the barrier, until 1957, when Walter O’Malley hijacked the franchise to Los Angeles and cut the heart out of Brooklyn, the Dodgers represented the best of America. While the United States remained legally segregated by race and fractured by religion and ethnicity, it was the Brooklyn Dodgers who offered the…
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A few weeks ago, I noted that in The Songlines, Bruce Chatwin made the case that early humans were prey more than they were predators. Now I've read a new book on the subject: Donna Hart and Robert W. Sussman, Man the Hunted (Westview, 2005). The book's title is a bit misleading because it concentrates…
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When I encountered an excerpt from wunderkind J. S. Foer's Everything is Illuminated in the New Yorker, I was dazzled. The writing was witty, focused, intelligent, and emotionally rich. Now I've read the whole book, and I'm deeply divided about this Jekyll-Hydish performance. The good parts are still excellent. Jonfen's Ukrainian adventures in search of…
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When I was no more than a hemidemisemiquaver, I would listen attentively as my mother sat at her old Hardman piano and sang ditties by Gilbert and Sullivan. I believe that the first song I ever learned “by heart” was “I’m called Little Buttercup” with its still mysterious “pretty polonies.” In 1947, when the D’Oyly…