Bill Kauffman

Latest by Bill Kauffman in Chronicles

• Blog

  August 15, 2019

  The City Beat

  Red Love is "third generation Leninist" porno star Suzie Sizzle's yet-unmade dream project, the love story of her aunt and uncle, the Rosenberg-like spies Dolly and Solly Rubell. Until Suzie's industry develops a revolutionary consciousness, we'll have to settle for David Evanier's novel of wit, fine malice, and the same title.

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• Blog

  June 5, 2019

  The Last Jeffersonian

  Let Vermont State Senator John McClaughry describe himself (with what he calls "a notorious Ozark accent"): "I am a 1700's Virginia republican, an 1800 Tertium Quid, an 1830's Loco Foco, an 1850's Republican, an 1890's Western progressive, a 1930's agrarian distributist, and today a plain old decentralist agrarian Reaganaut."

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• Blog

  December 3, 2018

  Sinclair Lewis

  To the end, [Sinclair] Lewis stayed true to his time and his locality. He insisted, despite the naysaying of the folks who run things in this country, on the romance of the "Average Citizens of the United States."

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• Blog

  May 10, 2018

  War From a Cabbage Patch

  You know you are not in for a Doris Kearns Goodwin/David McCullough hagiography when a biographer uses as an epigraph a character assessment by the thuggish Marilyn-mauling (Joe) McCarthyite RFK. (Isn’t the three-letter monogram usually a tip-off to a sinister force?)

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• Blog

  January 17, 2018

  Cherished Void

  Gene Roddenberry was a hustling ex-cop who wanted to strike it rich in television, and he did, with a series called Star Trek, which he once described (before his slide into self-mythicizing and lucrative licensing deals) as "Wagon Train To the Stars."

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• Blog

  December 14, 2017

  New York vs. New York

  Plunkitt lived in the days before garbage scows, Tawana Brawley, Nelson Rockefeller, radioactive waste, and the decimation of local government. In the Upstate-Downstate marriage, Plunkitt's was the Era of Good Feelings.

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• Blog

  July 19, 2017

  Up, Up, and Away

  Howard E. McCurdy, a political scientist fascinated by "the relationship between imagination and public policy," has written a lively account of the "concerted effort by writers of popular science and science fiction, along with other opinion leaders, to prepare the public for what they hoped would be the inevitable conquest of space."

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• Reviews

  May 2006

  The Way Home

  Wendell Berry’s latest harvest of essays contains characteristically wise observations on mobility, industrial agriculture, and other maladies of our age, but it also displays a Berry seldom glimpsed—that is, Wendell Berry as a rural Kentucky Democrat reluctant to quit a party that long ago quit rural America.

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• Reviews

  April 2005

  Hicks’ Town

  In 1932, Marxist literary critic Granville Hicks and his wife, Dorothy, bought an eight-room farmhouse in Grafton, New York, a rural hamlet ten miles east of Troy, where Hicks taught English to the young engineers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

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• Reviews

  November 2004

  War From a Cabbage Patch

  You know you are not in for a Doris Kearns Goodwin/David McCullough hagiography when a biographer uses as an epigraph a character assessment by the thuggish Marilyn-mauling (Joe) McCarthyite RFK.

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• Reviews

  June 2003

  The Patriot

  Edward Abbey used to say that he took great pride in getting more radical as he got older—no easy task for the anarchist son of a communist father, but an impeccably American maturation just the same.

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• View

  July 2001

  New York vs. New York

  Plunkitt lived in the days before garbage scows, Tawana Brawley, Nelson Rockefeller, radioactive waste, and the decimation of local government. In the Upstate-Downstate marriage, Plunkitt's was the Era of Good Feelings.

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• View

  November 2000

  "I'm Liberated; Free at Last!"

  Pat Buchanan has taken more punches than Chuck Wepner, hut unlike the Bayonne Bleeder, Buchanan has a good right hook (or is it now a left?) of his own.

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• View

  March 2000

  Come Home, America

  An outbreak of virulent place-ism has greeted the senatorial campaign of Hillary Rodham Clinton, despite the conciliatory editorials of the Gannett papers and despite Mrs. Clinton's assertion that "where I'm from is not as important as what I'm for."

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• Round Table Discussion

  January 2000

  Blame America First

  "America First," he said, whereupon the skies opened, the thunder cracked, the rains came . . . who knew the empire was so sensitive?

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• Reactionary Radicals

  November 1999

  The Militia of Love

  Snow Man follows Robert Drummond, a hairy and occasionally abominable patriot, a Maine militiaman who is between assassinations, as it were.

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• View

  October 1999

  The Making of an Individualist

  "To be merely queer is no achievement, but to be brilliantly individualistic is a fine art which Geneva brought to perfection," wrote Warren Hunting Smith, who died last November at the age of 93.

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• View

  August 1999

  The Anti-American Century

  The anti-American Century began with a bad moon rising. Our new possessions across the sea were awash in colonial gore. Surveying from afar the corpses of Filipino independence fighters and our blood-spattered flag, Mark Twain suggested that we substitute the skull and crossbones for the stars and stripes.

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• Cultural Revolutions

  July 1999

  Massacre in Littleton

  Eric Harris, the dominant half of the trenchcoated psychopathic duo who rampaged through Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, was the demented product of two enduring legacies of the Cold War: the consolidated super-school and the rootless military family.

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• Vital Signs

  January 1999

  The Conquest of the United States and Puerto Rico

  On the matter of statehood, Puerto Rico's outstanding novelist has written . . . actually, I have no idea what he has written, because I do not read Spanish, nor do I plan to learn.

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