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...
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
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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...
Jean-Paul Sartre was a professional phi- losopher who also sought to preach to a mass audience. For a time at least it looked as though he had succeeded. Certainly no philosopher this century has had so direct an impact on the minds and attitudes of so many human beings, especially young peo- ple, all over the world. Existentialism was the popular philosophy of the late 1940s and 1950s. His plays were hits. His books sold in enormous quantities, some of them over two million copies in France alone....
Carolyn Webber
The art of taxation, wrote Jean-warfare and standing armies-far the Baptiste Colbert, an adviser to greatest expense of government until re-France's Louis XIV, "consists in so cent times. During this century, especially plucking the goose as to obtain the largest since World War 11, tax burdens have possible amount of feathers with the small- grown dramatically, and taxation has ac-est possible amount of hissing." quired two new uses: "stabilizing" domes-
Over...
The art of taxation, wrote Jean-warfare and standing armies-by far the Baptiste Colbert, an adviser to greatest expense of government until re-France's Louis XIV, "consists in so cent times. During this century, especially plucking the goose as to obtain the largest since World War 11, tax burdens have possible amount of feathers with the small- grown dramatically, and taxation has ac-est possible amount of hissing." quired two new uses: "stabilizing" domes-
Over the centuries,...
in America has seemed almost like a re- prise of the Boston Tea Party.
More than the people of most nations, Americans generally have chosen to rely on the most painful forms of taxation (e.g., di- rect levies on property and income), keep- ing the tribute rendered "unto Caesar" at the forefront of public attention. Not only have Americans remained deeply un-friendly to the taxman, but our debates over taxation have been vehicles for defin- ing larger conflicts-between regions and classes,...