Since 2001 The Common Review has published essays about the books and ideas that matter. Whether the topic is women and Islam or the pleasures of Proust, we are committed to tough, street-smart prose that will challenge, amuse, and sometimes offend—all in the service of building the most thoughtful community of readers in America today. Scroll down to view selected articles from the Spring 2009 issue of the magazine. Better yet, subscribe today ($17.95 for four issues) or pick up a copy of The Common Review at your local bookstore.
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From the Editor
So the polar icecaps are melting at an alarming rate, Mount Kilimanjaro will be denuded of all its snow in twenty years, and a trash vortex twice the size of Texas swirls out in the Pacific between Hawaii and California, grinding up plastic waste into confetti-like bits wreaking ecological disaster on the great biological chain of being. It’s true. I know it is. It’s there in the pictures on the Internet, photos of the great African mountain then and the mountain as it is now. Photographic evidence shows ten-story-tall chunks of frozen goodness calving off the edge of the polar cap ice shelf into the sea. Well-documented reports from National Geographic scientists describe the watery graveyard of our plasticized folly, now officially designated the Eastern Pacific Garbage Patch.
And to imagine I could save myself by avoiding mercury-laced swordfish and tuna. Oh, for it to be as simple as avoiding sushi—which I don’t care for much anyway. Read this article.
Feature Articles
Irving Howe published his intellectual autobiography, A Margin of Hope (1982), just as the Reagan era was dawning, and the timing of the memoir’s release highlighted what most of his friends and enemies already knew: despite Howe’s success as an author, editor, literary critic, public intellectual, and radical activist, his political life as a socialist tribune was marked by a series of failures that reflected the declining prospects of American socialism itself. Howe’s enemies mocked him as a hopeless utopian; his accurate critique of Communism never endeared him to most conservatives. Meanwhile, the Far Left attacked him as a wavering, lukewarm liberal. Howe’s brand of moderate democratic socialism seemed all but forgotten. Read this article.
Reviews
Alain de Botton is the most widely read English language philosopher in the world today, and if you take into account the many languages his work has been translated into, and the low-threshold requirements for a philosophy bestseller, he is likely the most popular philosopher in the world, period. All told, he has written three novels that received decent reviews and modest sales, four bestselling philosophy texts, and an immensely popular volume that bridged the categories of self-help and literary criticism: How Proust Can Change Your Life (1997). Read this review.
Thomas Pynchon may be our last great Calvinist writer. Since the publication of his first novel V. in 1963, a dark spirit of pessimism has brooded often over his work, and foreboding hints of wrathful divinity, hovering just beyond the outer limits of our awareness, have frequently cropped up in the margins of his narratives. “Paranoia” is the mode of this Pynchon—a disposition, indulged as much by his narrators as by his characters, to see everywhere the signs of nefarious intrigue behind the apparent accidents of history. Sin and the distant promise of retribution are restlessly at work in this world. Read this review.
