A gonzo sociologist discovers how drug gangs give ghetto life a fragile kind of order.
Books
Book reviews and essays from the Washington Monthly on the new books shaping debates over politics, policy, history, and American democracy.
Posted inMagazine
Was It Worth It?
A new book shatters many myths about Vietnam, but misses the larger point.
Posted inOctober 1999
Blaming the Messenger
Two new books hark back to a media “golden age” that never existed.
Posted inMagazine
Apocalypse Later
By chance, two bits of writing on the Antarctic ice shelf recently crossed my desk on the same day. One was a galley of The Heat Is On, a new book by veteran journalist Ross Gelbspan. It begins by asserting that the vast astral ice field may soon topple into the ocean, raising sea levels […]
Posted inSeptember 1987
Making McKinley Sexy
Gore Vidal’s fiction is fun and accurate. Too bad his non-fiction is reckless and annoying.
Posted inMagazine
Fear and Loathing in Silicon Valley
Put down that pocket calculator! Don’t go near the softwear! Oh, my God! The PC! It’s .. it’s … it’s got Melissa! Silicon chips, it turns out, aren’t our little electronic friends after all. They’re ominous. Behind them lurk greed, exploitation, water pollution, and middle-age stress syndrome. These chips are eeeevil. So say two related […]
Posted inUncategorized
What Caspar Weinberger Could Learn from the Falklands
If only Ethell and Price would turn their talents to the U.S. military, asking lower-level soldiers what is actually happening, as opposed to what Pentagon press kits say is happening; and if only someone on Capitol Hill, where committees fund now and ask questions later, would listen.
Posted inMagazine
The Republican Soul
The little boy’s father has a good heart, but he drinks. Goes on weeklong benders. It’s the early 1920s, a bad time to be a drunk: Prohibition has arrived and the Depression isn’t far behind. The boy recalls childhood fears of an absent father followed by “loud voices in the night.” At age 11, he […]
