Endless Game of Thrones

A Song of Ice and Fire by George R. R. Martin (5 of 7 planned volumes). Bantam, 1996–2012. Paper, 5232 pages, $75.   The embarrassment of narrative in a radically skeptical postmodern world is that it implies meaning. Simply constructing a story with beginning,...

Resisting Ideology’s Reductionism

The New Jacobinism: America as Revolutionary State (2d expanded ed.) by Claes G. Ryn. National Humanities Institute, 2011, 163 pp., paper, $15.Near the end of his Reflections on the Revolution in France, Edmund Burke praised what he called the “combining mind” as...

The Architecture of a Man’s Time

Essays: Personal and Impersonal, by Milton Hindus. Black Sparrow Press, 1988 191 pp., paper, $10.00. Milton Hindus’s Essays: Personal and Impersonal is not an encyclopaedic volume except for the climate of its thought, tolerantly revealing to Hindus and his reader...

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose

The Accidental City: Improvising New Orleans, by Lawrence N. Powell. Harvard University Press, 2012. Cloth, 448 pages, $30. The city of New Orleans has long had a firm grip on the imagination of Americans (a grip that existed long before the round-the-clock news...

Union and Liberty

May the Road Rise Up to Meet You by Peter Troy. Doubleday, 2012, 400 pp., $27. “How you know whachu stitchin when it don’ look like nothing but a buncha threads ain’ got nothing t’do wit each otha?” asks the ten-year-old slave Mary as she watches her fellow slave and...

American Sound—Twentieth Century

Voices of Stone and Steel: The Music of William Schuman, Vincent Persichetti, and Peter Mennin by Walter Simmons. Scarecrow Press, 2010 Cloth, 438 pages, $70. In his epochal study Voices in the Wilderness (2008), musicologist Walter Simmons charted the careers and...