Michael Nelson

Morale. By John Gardner. Norton. $7.95. American Reformers, 1815—1860. by Ronald G. Walters. Hill and Wang. $10.95. REMEMBER, if you can, the last graduation ceremony you went to. Remember the heat, the glare, the bugs buzzing around your head, t [...]

Robert Kennedy and His Times. By Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. Houghton Mifflin. $19.95 Months before its release, long before the reviews were assigned or the store copies ordered, the book world knew that Robert Kennedy and His Times was going to be [...]

Henry Kissinger published Volume One of his memoirs, The White House Years, through Little, Brown, a subsidiary of Time, Inc.; released it through the Book-of-the-Month Club, another Time, Inc. company; and permitted Time itself to run lengthy prepu [...]

The United States elects its president every four years, which makes it unique among democratic nations. Time magazine runs a story about James David Barber every presidential election year, which makes him unique among political scientists. The t [...]

Somewhere along the line, even those of us who are not deeply versed in Hegel probably have heard the popularized version of his theory that historical change is the product of clashes of ideas. "Thesis," the leading idea of an age, confronts "antit [...]

Stephen L. Carter's The Emperor of Ocean Park was the publishing phenomenon of 2002. The $4.2 million advance Carter received from Alfred A. Knopf, joined with the $1 million advance he got from Jonathan Cape (the largest ever given to a first-time [...]

Good Friday fell on April 14 in 1865. At 10:13 that evening Abraham Lincoln was shot by the Confederate partisan John Wilkes Booth. He died nine hours later, at 7:22 on Saturday morning. It took almost no time at all for pious and patriotic people [...]

The story of Robert A. Caro and his first book, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, has entered the realm of authorial legend. The elements of the tale are familiar, at least among journalists and writers: how Caro left an inve [...]

The program begins with music at five o'clock Central Time on Saturday evenings, and music makes up nearly half the two-hour show. The first words to come out of Garrison Keillor's mouth at the start of his weekly public radio program, A Prairie Ho [...]

You have had the same experience that I have. Perhaps it was at a memorial service, at which one person spoke of the deceased as a father, another as a husband, another as a coworker, and another as a best friend. Or maybe it was at the rehearsal din [...]

Enter any music store and ask for the Frank Sinatra section and you can expect two surprises, one obvious, the other less so. The obvious surprise is how many bins of Sinatra compact discs and audiocassettes you will find. Music stores are not mus [...]

Pity me in 1973: a second-year graduate student, committed to turning avocation (a fascination with American politics) into vocation (political scientist) and increasingly dissatisfied with my commitment. I read day and night in my library carrel� [...]

The student's name was Ben. He was a first-year student in his first week of college, and as I ate my lunch in the refectory I could see that he was waiting for me to finish so that he could approach my table. "I hear that you are a Christian," he sa [...]

Nearly a quarter century after his death on Nov. 22, 1963, the popularity of C.S. Lewis, who made his living as a literary scholar at Oxford and Cambridge but is better known for his apologetic and imaginative works of Christian literature, refuses t [...]

James Sterling Young's Washington Community, 1800—1828 created something of a scholarly sensation when it was published in 1966 by Columbia University Press, and justly so.The Washington Community was that rarest of all things in modern academe: [...]