The New Criterion
(Mobile Version)

January 2001 Volume 19, Number 5  

Notes & Comments

Michigan’s thin line

Anti-Americanism alive and well


Features

Telling stories, denying style: Reflections on “MoMA2000”
by Hilton Kramer

Philhellene's progress: Patrick Leigh Fermor
by Ben Downing

Sadness balancing wit: Thackeray's life & works
by Brooke Allen

Emmanuel Chabrier & French musical tradition
by James Penrose
A consideration of the composer & his effect on post-Wagnerian French music.


Poems

Starr Farm Beach
by Timothy Steele

Snow
by Timothy Steele

Guides for the soul
by Dick Davis


Theater

The measure of smartness
by Mark Steyn
On Reading Lyrics: More Than a Thousand of the Century’s Finest Lyrics, edited by Robert Gottlieb and Robert Kimball, Jane Eyre by Paul Gordon and John Caird, and The Music Man by Meredith Wilson.


Art

Baschenis at the Met
by Karen Wilkin
On “The Still Lifes of Evaristo Baschenis: The Music of Silence,” at the Metropolitan Museam of Art.

Gallery chronicle
by Daniel Kunitz
On “R. B. Kitaj: How to reach 67 in Jewish Art,” at the Marlborough Gallery; “Richard Diebenkorn: Early Abstractions 1949-“1955,” at Lawrence Rubin Greenberg Van Doren Fine Art & “Miro: 16 Late Masterworks,” at Salander O'Reilly Gallery.


Architecture

“Inventing the Skyline”: the career of Cass Gilbert
by Francis Morrone
Reflections on the pianist’s recent concert & two new recordings.


Music

Earl Wild at 85
by Jay Nordlinger
On the end of the presidential election.


The Media

The familiar hypocrisy
by James Bowman
On the end of the presidential election.


Books

No idiocy like educated idiocy
by Anthony Daniels
A review of The Guide to the Perfect Latin American Idiot, by Plinio Alueyo Mendoza, Carlos Alberto Montaner, and Alvaro Vargas Llosa & In the Shadow of the Liberator: The Impact of Hugo Chavez on Venezuala and Latin America, by Richard Gott.

Valiant for truth
by John Derbyshire
A review of Did Adam and Eve Have Navels? Discourses on Reflexology Numerology, Urine Therapy, and Other Dubious Subjects, by Martin Gardner.

The survivor
by Paul Dean
A review of Thomas Gray: A Life, by Robert L. Mack.

The small house
by Marc M. Arkin
A review of Troubling Confessions: Speaking Guilt in Law and Literature, by Peter Brooks.

Genial improvisations
by Alexander Coleman
A review of This Craft of Verse, by Jorge Luis Borges, edited by Calin-Andrei Mihailescu.