No reader or writer of any serious- ness can do without a good dic- tionary. This, anyway, is the modern view. With some awe we have to remind ourselves that writers like Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton had no ac- cess to what we would call dictionaries. Spell- ing did not much worry them, as it worries a modem author who runs to his dictionary to check on difficult words like hemorrhage (my personal blind spot). Milton spelt in his own creative manner, preferring mee to me when he wished to...
Revealing the dark side of the best-loved English poet of his generation, the recently published biography and selected letters of Philip Larkin sent shock waves through the litera y world. How might readers respond to the work of a man who gleefully raved against women, minorities, and almost everybody else, including himself? Edward Hirsch ponders the question.
hilip Larkin has increasingly
come to seem the greatest English
poet after W. H. Auden, though
the word "great" is perhaps
mildly...
its Republican predecessors, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the larger General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). Talk of an interna- tional trade war, the likes of which we have not seen since the 1930s, was thick in the
more than 200 years ago Adam Smith and later elaborated by David Ricardo. It says, with blinding simplicity, that the best way for all to prosper is for each region to produce the goods it can manufacture most cheaply and efficiently and to trade them w...
ANNE THURSTON
Since the death of Mao Zedong in
1976, China's moribund communist
dynasty has been at least par-
tially revived. But as Deng
Xiaoping, architect of the restor-
ation, approaches his 89th year,
China finds itself on the brink of
a most uncertain future. Anne
Thurston, a veteran China-watcher
recently returned from the
People's Republic, looks at the
puzzles and contradictions of
the present for clues to where Asia's
greatest dragon may head.
communism ha...
The field of contemporary China studies has never been short on punditry, but recent years have witnessed an out-pouring of essays and books on the current Chinese condition. The Beijing massacre of 1989 alone produced over 30 books on the 50 days that shook the world. Most of the grow- ing Tiananmen bookshelf consists either of descriptive accounts by foreign eyewitnesses or of emotional autobiographies by Chinese dissidents now exiled abroad. The best analy- sis of the origins and events of...
If Weldon Kees were alive today, he would be 79 years old; but the first thing that makes this unthinkable is his poems. Their vehement bleakness makes it all too plausible that on July 19, 1955, when a car registered in his name was found near the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, the 41-year-old Weldon Kees had committed suicide.
PETE-R F. DRUCKER
Since ancient times, new knowledge and new
inventions have periodically remade human societies.
Today, however, knowledge is assuming greater importance
than ever before. Now more essential to the wealth of
nations than either capital or labor, Peter Drucker argues
here, it has already created a "postcapitalist" society
and promises further transformations on a global scale.
n only 150 years, between about 1750 and capitalism into Capitalism. Instead of...
OF THE
BY PETE-R F. DRUCKER
Since ancient times, new knowledge and new
inventions have periodically remade human societies.
Today, however, knowledge is assuming greater importance
than ever before. Now more essential to the wealth of
nations than either capital or labor, Peter Drucker argues
here, it has already created a "postcapitalist" society
and promises further transformations on a global scale.
n only 150 years, between about 1750 and capitalism into Capitalism. In...
Futurology tends to make scholars queasy. They generally prefer to leave the forecast- ing trade to science-fiction scribblers, free- lance prognosticators, and other untenured sorts. Social scientists somberly agree that their work must have "predictive value," but actual predic- tions, apart from economists' exercises in number crunching, are few. It is unique, then, to find some- body from the scholarly world who not only has tried his hand at prediction but is in a position to act:...
"If America is wrong, Jefferson is wrong," an early biographer wrote. "If America is right, Jefferson is right." This year, on his 250th birthday, it would appear that Jefferson was wrong. Many
historians of late have found the third U.S. president guilty of racism and other sins that besmirch the national character. Gordon Wood, by contrast, argues that Jefferson has never been an apt mirror of America. He was a representative figure of his day whose words haunt us because, unlike him, they transcend his own time.