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 Fall 2008 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.
NEWS ITEM: Check out "Allen Ginsberg's 'Howl' and the Paperback Revolution," by Bill Savage, on the Academy of American Poets website, Poets.org. You can read this fine article, which appears originally in the Summer 2008 issue of The Common Review, as well as explore Ginsberg's "Howl" and other Beat Generation poems at Poets.org.
From the Editor
Future generations will know us by our books, ideas, and a few key personalities. But the objects of our affection also provide clues to who we are. The Fifties gave us swooping tailfins from Detroit and the Hula Hoop from Wham-O toys. In the Sixties we got the tie-dyed T-shirt, accessorized most aggressively by the minions of the Grateful Dead and eventually finding its way into every Kmart in the republic. The Seventies showered us with fat neckties, platform shoes, and mustached men in stained leisure suits. In a word, Ron Burgundy. Read this article
Feature Articles
For a long time now, well-meaning adults have been wondering why rap music dominates American popular culture. They’re particularly puzzled about why rap sells as much as it does among well-to-do white kids, especially boys. These adults know that “gangsta rap”—a popular form of rap music often characterized by depictions of gang violence and murder, drug dealing and fast money, and innuendo regarding sexual prowess—is ubiquitous among young people, and that usually disturbs them. But finding ways to talk productively about gangsta rap hasn’t been easy. For obvious reasons, young people resist adult incursions onto their cultural turf. When the subject of their musical tastes arises, they tend to clam up. And many adults, open-minded as they may be, don’t usually have the terms to pose questions about even rap music in general; they often don’t quite know how to get the discussion going. But I think that the best context for talking about the rap genre, and gangsta rap in particular, are ready at hand—especially for those of us who teach and study the humanities and above all the classics. Many of rap’s values have actually been around for a long time. Read this article
Reviews
“Writing On Native Grounds,” said the American literary critic Alfred Kazin, “felt to me—to us—to be a political act. The country was on the move—we were on the move. We were learning America.” Perhaps more than any other critic of his time, Alfred Kazin understood the “democratic impulse” and energy that defined America and American literature. His life, as well as his personal and public writing, was buoyed by these currents in which he never lost faith. And yet he remained a man perpetually isolated and apart—intellectually active, often contentious in his relationship with other literary critics; truly, as Richard Cook says, “an Emersonian thinker-at-large.” In this first biography of Alfred Kazin, who died a decade ago, Cook weaves together a life mostly through autobiography, interviews, and Kazin’s own journal entries. It is a life of physical and intellectual restlessness, of craving, seeking, longing, even devouring. The result is a portrait of a man who would not be stilled. Read this review
In America’s marketplace of ideas, the madcap and the delusional sell like water in a wasteland. From wide-eyed religious zealots to dreadlocked New Age shamans, our nation has no shortage of outrageous—and outraged—voices discharging into the ears of millions. Susan Jacoby mined American religiosity in her commanding 2004 study Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism, and now she returns to the territory of dispute with The Age of American Unreason, a terrifying examination of how the United States came to be a hotbed of irrationality. Jacoby’s voice is so sound and measured, so erudite and authoritative, that it does much to reinstate the credibility some secularists felt they lost as a result of the big-mouthed bludgeoning and often sloppy reasoning perpetuated of late by the neo-atheists. Read this review