2006 Archive (5 found)
Between Enemies
October 29, 2006 | San Francisco Chronicle
They say that Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg are great pals. The two U.S. Supreme Court Justices couldn’t be further apart, ideologically — ‘Nino, the paleo-conservative who dips his quill in venom and Ginsburg, a former ACLU attorney and women’s libber — and they spar ferociously on the page. Yet they also vacation together. …
Brown Pursued Just Ideas to Bloody End
October 23, 2006 | San Francisco Chronicle
Frederick Douglass , who escaped slavery and became America’s most eloquent black abolitionist, said, “To have been acquainted with John Brown, shared his counsels, enjoyed his confidence, sympathized with the great objects of his life and death, I esteem as among the highest privileges of my life.” Brown — America’s antislavery revolutionary, a white man …
A Minister’s Big Love
July 2, 2006 | San Francisco Chronicle
Modern readers will recognize the name Henry Ward Beecher, if at all, as the brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose 1852 novel “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” helped precipitate the Civil War. But as the title of Debby Applegate’s biography, “The Most Famous Man in America,” screamingly makes clear, in his day Henry was the better-known Beecher. …
Freud Remains Iconoclastic Professor’s Most Worthy Opponent
May 7, 2006 | San Francisco Chronicle
When Frederick Crews published his review essay “The Unknown Freud” in the New York Review of Books in 1993, he fired the opening shot in what has become known as the “Freud wars,” a ferocious clash over the father of psychoanalysis and his legacy. Crews, a former English professor at UC Berkeley, was by no …
Another Frenchman Assesses our Democracy
January 29, 2006 | San Francisco Chronicle
In the opening of “American Vertigo,” Bernard-Henri Lévy (or BHL, as he is commonly known) warns that his book should not be viewed as a reply or addition to Alexis de Tocqueville’s 1840 masterwork, “Democracy in America.” He’s right. The latter was a Frenchman’s explication of the unique form of American government — especially compared …