FLECTIONS
A person spends almost his entire adult life quietly practicing the profes- sion, chemistry, for which he was trained, and finally he dies in the same house where he was born. What life could sound more tranquil? Yet when that life is interrupted, as Primo Levi's was, by the 20th centu- ry's ultimate horror, then such tranquility can only be superficial, a mockingly deceptive appearance. In 1943, fighting Fascists and Nazis as a Jewish-Italian partisan, Primo Levi was captured and deported...
iterary friendships are often unwieldy
was 47 years old and, if William Carlos
-
things, awkwardly glued together by
Williams is to be believed, the "saint" of
admiration, mutual sense of purpose-and
American poets, a respected scion of mod-
a
healthy dose of professional paranoia.
ernism, possessed of
a
refreshing disre-
Emerson, as Whitman put it, brought the...
Jude Wanniski in The Way the World Works (Simon & Schuster, rev. ed., 1983), an ambitious "supply side" re- interpretation of history in terms of taxation and economic principles.
"What made the Industrial Revolution and the Pax Britannica possible," Wanniski argues, with an eye on contemporary American poli- tics, "was the audacity of the British Parlia- ment," which ignored the experts' dire warnings about the growing national debt in 18 15, after the defeat...
the National Research Council.
Of the familiar "three R's," reading and writing have aroused the most concern in today's debates over school re- form. Yet "numeracy" is no less important than literacy, notes the U.S. National Re- search Council (NRC).
"No longer just the language of science, mathematics now contributes in direct and fun- damental ways to business, fi-nance, health, and defense."
Yet, from elementary schools to universities, today's dismal mathematics...
During the 1920s, H. L. Mencken was the voice of the educated and sophisticated throughout America. His criticism of Presidents Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover...
Before I am charged with unfair labeling, let me make clear that I am talking not about ancient Greece but 20th-century Brazil. The Corinthians under discussion rarely, if ever, travel by boat, and this particular Socrates, while given to philosophizing, is a popular soccer player.
S. Frederick Starr
Areforming crusade grips the USSR. previous waves of reform in their own Enthusiasts of change call for new country. Newly published memoirs of the laws, new economic mechanisms, Khrushchev "thaw" (1956-64) find avid even a new and more independent national readers in Moscow. Gorbachev himself of- psychology in place of the old conformism. ten hails the era of Lenin's New Economic What Gorbachev calls "rapid transforma- Policy (1921-28) as a pattern for the tions...
Areforming crusade grips the USSR. previous waves of reform in their own Enthusiasts of change call for new country. Newly published memoirs of the laws, new economic mechanisms, Khrushchev "thaw" (1956-64) find avid even a new and more independent national readers in Moscow. Gorbachev himself of- psychology in place of the old conformism. ten hails the era of Lenin's New Economic What Gorbachev calls "rapid transforma- Policy (1921-28) as a pattern for the tions in all spheres...
ight months in the Soviet capital left me convinced that perestroika, Gorbachev's "restructuring" of the
-
Soviet economy, remains a phantom. It has not yet touched the average Russian. If a political rival to ~orbachev were to look his countrymen square in the eye and ask, as Ronald Reagan once did in a somewhat different context, "Are you better off now than you were three years ago?", the an- swer would be a reverberating "No."
Perestroika is, as Soviet citizens t...
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The origins of the first Russian state remain a mystery. Scholars differ over whether the early Rus' people were descended from Nordic in- vaders or tribal Slavs from southern Russia, as Nicholas Riasanovsky notes in A History of Russia (Oxford, 1984). What is clear is that the Rus' were first united by the warrior-princes of Kiev during the ninth century. One of these princes, Vladimir (980- 101 5), converted the Kievan Rus' to Orthodox Christianity in 988, "thus opening the gates for...