There’s a reason New York’s "Hell’s Kitchen" was called by that name, and—to a large degree—that reason is Owen (called…
Books & CDs
On her very first LP, on the Bethlehem label in 1957, there was, in the singing and piano playing of…
If you’ve found yourself left breathless by the breakneck pace of Hollywood’s recent action thrillers, you probably have one man…
Dispatches was praised by John le Carre as "the best book I have ever read on men and war in…
One "minor character" is accorded just half a sentence in biographies of cult author Jack Kerouac: he had "an erratic…
Ian McEwan’s latest novel, Atonement, which was nominated for the Booker Prize in 2001, is a taut, intensely satisfying meditation…
culturevulture.net reviews of Spielberg films: A.I. Artificial Intelligence Catch Me If You Can Jaws Minority Report Saving Private Ryan Orson…
In 1979, Jonathan Raban journeyed down the Mississippi from Minneapolis to New Orleans in a specially equipped 16-foot motorboat. Quite…
Robin is nine and hangs from a tree. His neck is broken and no one knows who has killed him….
Lou Reed’s career is a mystery on at least two levels. The first, of course, is the series of artistic…
Soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy played with pianist/composer Thelonious Monk for four months in 1960. He’s made explorations of Monk’s music…
In one of the essays collected in Making Museums Matter, Stephen E. Weil quotes Alfred H. Barr on the principal…
Are the media biased? Well, it depends on how you look at it. Fox News Channel, for example, is a…
In the author’s note that opens Nonrequired Reading, Polish poet and Nobel laureate Wislawa Szymborska writes about a reader’s freedom:…