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Atlantic Unbound | Archive
Benjamin Schwarz
Recent articles by Benjamin Schwarz: Waste Not, Want EverythingEditor’s Choice: A panoramic new history brilliantly mixes the seismic and the everyday. Black SaturdayEditor’s Choice: How the Blitz saved Britain. California CoolModernism's western rebirth. Couture ClashHow Dior and Balenciaga fought it out. Charm OffensiveEditor’s Choice: Womanizer, bribe-taker, statesman—the cynically brilliant Talleyrand inspired an equally colorful biographer. Toiling in the Dream FactoryEditor’s Choice: Moviemaking in Hollywood’s classical period was colossally complex, backbreakingly difficult, obscenely expensive—and it almost always failed. Life in the MarginsEditor’s Choice: Finding the private lives of medieval men and women in the pages of their prayer books. The Other Elizabeth TaylorEditor’s Choice: The late English writer is overdue for the recognition and readers she deserves. His Second ActEditor’s Choice: How Frank Sinatra staged the most spectacular comeback in American cultural history. Where Mother Saw BestAt home with the modernists. Stalin’s GiftStalin on the Eastern Front. “Show the Dress”The history of Vogue Of Rivals and RevivalsBritain vs. France through the ages. Becoming Cary GrantWhat to read this month. Walt's WorldWalt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination, by Neal Gabler. Babes in ToylandThe Arcades Project, by Walter Benjamin; Carried Away, by Rachel Bowlby; Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping, edited by Chuihua Judy Chung, Jeffrey Inaba, Rem Koolhaas, and Sze Tsung Leong; Mall Maker, by M. Jeffrey Hardwick; Victor Gruen, by Alex Wall. The Path of Least ResistanceWhat to read this month. Orson AgonistesOrson Welles: Hello Americans, by Simon Callow; Framing the Early Middle Ages, by Chris Wickham. Chairs, Rag Mags, Indian WarsPhaidon Design Classics; A Dash of Daring, by Penelope Rowlands; Yellowstone Command, by Jerome A. Greene. Fire From the SkyAmong the Dead Cities, by A. C. Grayling. Cover to CoverA guide to additional releases. Modernism, Minimalism, FundamentalismGlenn Murcutt: buildings + projects 1962-2003, by Francoise Fromonot; Hariri & Hariri Houses, by Gisui Hariri and Mojgan Hariri; The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel, by Amy Hempel; Fundamentalism and American Culture, by George M. Marsden. Lee and ShermanFever, by Peter Richmond; Upon the Altar of the Nation, by Harry S. Stout; Scars of War, Wounds of Peace, by Shlomo Ben-Ami; Barrier by Isabel Kershner. Another 5001 Nights at the MoviesAmerican Movie Critics: An Anthology From the Silents Until Now, edited by Phillip Lopate. The Not-So-Second CityChicago Architecture and Design, by Jay Pridmore and George A. Larson; Chicago Architecture: Histories, Revisions, Alternatives, edited by Charles Waldheim and Katerina Rüedi Ray; Building Jerusalem: The Rise and Fall of the Victorian City. The Perils of PrimacyWhen too much power means not enough security. Passion in FashionSample: Cuttings From Contemporary Fashion, edited by Bronwyn Cosgrave; Encyclopedia of Clothing and Fashion, edited by Valerie Steele; Mao, by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday; New Art City, by Jed Perl. War Without EndThe Third Reich in Power, by Richard J. Evans; A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water, by Patrick Leigh Fermor; Pétain, by Charles Williams; In Command of History, by David Reynolds; Forgotten Armies, by Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper. Another WorldThe Stripping of the Altars, by Eamon Duffy; The Mind of the Master Class, by Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene D. Genovese; Crazy Horse, by Mari Sandoz. He Found It at the MoviesJames Agee: Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, A Death in the Family, Shorter Fiction and James Agee: Film Writing & Selected Journalism, edited by Michael Sragow; Louis I. Kahn, by Robert McCarter; Tired of Weeping, by Jónína Einarsdóttir; The Chosen, by Jerome Karabel. Elements of StyleSinatra, by Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan; Chanel, edited by Harold Koda and Andrew Bolton; Edmund Wilson, by Lewis M. Dabney; The Lights That Failed, by Zara Steiner. Golden StateThe Golden West, by Daniel Fuchs; California Rising: The Life and Times of Pat Brown, by Ethan Rarick; The Singapore Grip, by J. G. Farrell; The Survivor, by John F. Harris; Carry Me Back, by Steven Deyle. Managing China's RiseContending effectively with China's ambitions requires a better understanding of our own. Eminent DomainsThe Sky's the Limit, by Steven Gaines; London 1945, by Maureen Waller; The Command of the Ocean, by N. A. M. Rodger. Will Israel Live to 100?Don't be seduced by the recent hopeful signs: in the long run the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will remain a problem without a solution. The Lost CrusadeAgainst the Beast, edited by John Nichols; War and the Iliad, by Simone Weil and Rachel Bespaloff; Understanding Dante, by John A. Scott. Clothes-MindedThe London Look: Fashion From Street to Catwalk, by Christopher Breward, Edwina Ehrman, and Caroline Evans; Harvard Rules, by Richard Bradley; The Glorious Cause, by Robert Middlekauff; The Meaning of Independence, by Edmund Morgan. An Exquisite SloggerV. S. Pritchett, by Jeremy Treglown; Born Losers, by Scott A. Sandage; War in the Wild East, by Ben Shepherd. Cheap at $13,000Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, edited by H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison; Encyclopedia of the Great Plains, edited by David J. Wishart; The Children's Blizzard, by David Laskin; The Encyclopedia of Chicago, edited by James R. Grossman, Ann Durkin Keating, and Janice L. Reiff; Chicago, by A. J. Liebling; Honored Guest, by Joy Williams. The South in Black and WhiteThe Rural Face of White Supremacy by Mark Schultz; Israel on the Appomatox by Melvin Patrick Ely; Picturing Faith by Colleen McDannell; Conjectures of Order by Michael O'Brien. The Glass of FashionWhat to read this month—and what not to. Wolves, Actors, JihadisVicious, by Jon Coleman; Who the Hell's in It, by Peter Bogdanovich; Imperial Hubris, by Anonymous; Heloise & Abelard, by James Burge. New & NoteworthyLandon Carter's Uneasy Kingdom, by Rhys Isaac; Hatchet Jobs, by Dale Peck; The North American Prairie, by Stephen R. Jones and Ruth Carol Cushman; The Crow Indians, by Robert H. Lowie; War Under Heaven, by Gregory Evans Dowd; Europe's Last Summer: Who Started the Great War in 1914?, by David Fromkin; The First World War, by Hew Strachan; Cataclysm: The First World War as Political Tragedy, by David Stevenson; The Killing Ground, by Tim Travers. New & NoteworthyInside the Victorian Home, by Judith Flanders; Family Fortunes, by Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall; Public Lives, by Eleanor Gordon and Gwyneth Nair; The Guardians, by Geoffrey Kabaservice; The Greeks and the Irrational, by E. R. Dodds. New & NoteworthyThe Reformation, by Diarmaid MacCulloch; The War for Righteousness, by Richard M. Gamble; New Grub Street, by George Gissing. New & NoteworthyThe Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited, by Benny Morris; Fidelity, by Michael Redhill; The Making of the Poets, by Ian Gilmour; Alexander Hamilton, by Ron Chernow. Clearer Than the TruthDuplicity in foreign affairs has sometimes served the national interest. But the case of Iraq is different. New & NoteworthyThe Origins of the Final Solution, by Christopher R. Browning, with contributions by Jürgen Matthäus; Report From a Parisian Paradise, by Joseph Roth; Dresden, by Frederick Taylor; Burying Caesar, by Graham Stewart; Inside Hitler's Bunker, by Joachim Fest; London: Life in the Post-War Years, by Douglas Whitworth. New & NoteworthyWhy we review the books we do; Rosamond Lehmann, by Selina Hastings; The Coming of the Third Reich, by Richard J. Evans. New & NoteworthyWhat to read this month. Notes From a Native DaughterJoan Didion's decline. New & NoteworthyWhat to read this month. New & NoteworthyWhat to read this month. New & NoteworthyWhat to read this month. New & NoteworthyWhat to read this month. New & NoteworthyWhat to read this month. New & NoteworthyWhat to read this month. New & NoteworthyWhat to read this month. New & NoteworthyThe best bets in a crowded autumn field. Men of LettersThe decline of "amateur journalism" Elegant Common SenseH. L. Mencken's perfect marriage of style and substance. California TransformedThe Golden State in the 1940s. Sheer DataSinclair Lewis's great accomplishment was, as E. M. Forster marveled, "to lodge a piece of a continent in our imagination" A Bit of BuntingA new history of the British Empire elevates expediency to principle. The Real WarStephen Ambrose's GIs are plaster saints engaged in a sanctified crusade. Going All Out for ChineseSome of the best Chinese food in the world is being served in Los Angeles's new Sino-suburbs. Monte Carlo, MississippiTunica County, in the Mississippi Delta, has long been among the poorest places in America. But casino gambling is changing Tunica's prospects. The rich Delta soil is sprouting golf courses, and if all goes according to plan, white retirees will soon be moving in. Meanwhile, blacks, Tunica's majority, are not sharing in the boom and are under financial pressure to leave the land that their labor transformed from a vast swamp. Around the Big BendThe magnificently solitary landscape of West Texas is studded with surprises John O'Hara's ProtectorateHis undisguised longing for acclaim still keeps John O'Hara from being the favorite son of the place he defined Dirty HandsThe success of U.S. policy in El Salvador—preventing a guerrilla victory—was based on 40,000 political murders The Idea of the SouthThe American South may be joining the national parade, but writing about the South still tries to establish its distinctiveness Insidious WeaknessNamed for Eugene Debs, and raised in a socialist, racially liberal household, Orval E. Faubus, the governor of Arkansas during the 1957 desegregation crisis, was not the last politician to be hollowed out by ambition What Jefferson Helps to ExplainA recent article in these pages argued that Thomas Jefferson was so deeply racist that he should be expelled from the American pantheon. But examining the problems this ambiguous figure poses for Americans reveals how the American principles of democracy and equality were entwined with the country's practice of slavery and racism, and helps to explain why America has had such difficulty creating an interracial society Was the Great War Necessary?A young historian argues iconoclastically that Britain's entry into the First World War, in 1914, was "the greatest error of modern history," born of neurotic fears projected onto Germany Why America Thinks It Has to Run the WorldThe Cold War is over, and America is staggering under a colossal debt and an accumulation of frightening social problems. Yet it continues to spend billions to protect Germany and Japan—two rich nations whose freedom is in no apparent danger. Why? Here is the answer that the foreign-policy elite would give if it dared to speak frankly about the delicate matter of American efforts to assert international economic and political control The Diversity MythThe hortatory version of our history, in which America has long been a land of ethnic tolerance and multicultural harmony, leaves us with nothing useful to say to the failed states and riven polities of the post-Cold War world Picking a Good FightAn Atlantic Online roundtable on the Kosovo Conflict Updike: America's Man of LettersA review of William H. Pritchard's work of criticism Orwell: Wintry Conscience of a GenerationA review of Jeffrey Meyers's biography of the British dystopian Test of Courage: The Michel Thomas StoryA review of Christopher Robbins's biography of a world-famous linguist and Holocaust survivor The Dark Valley: A Panorama of the 1930sA reivew of a gigantic, sweeping history of the Great Powers in the grip of the Great Depression |
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Benjamin Schwarz is literary editor and national editor of The Atlantic. His first piece for the magazine,