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"Blind Eye: How the Medical Establishment Let a Doctor Get Away With Murder"
A throrough investigation tells a hair-raising story but doesn't go far enough in its indictment of the medical profession.
By Bill Vourvoulias
[09/02/99]

The respectable cult
A new book asks why Christian Science has gotten away with the kind of paranoid, secretive practices that usually push religions into the kook bin.
By Laura Miller
[09/01/99]

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"Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash"
A close look at garbage comes up with gold.
By Peter Kurth
[09/01/99]

Ivory Tower
Fear 101
Seasonal teaching anxiety reduces the most experienced professors to raw nerves and nightmares.
By Elizabeth Bobrick
[09/01/99]

Interview
Like Jonestown in slow motion
Caroline Fraser, author of "God's Perfect Child," talks about the casualties of Christian Science's belief in the power of prayer and the media's soft spot for the church.
By Laura Miller
[09/01/99]

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Some background: White was originally commissioned (by Angell, his stepson) to write the piece for Holiday magazine in the sweltering summer of 1949. By then, White had left New York for his home in Maine. In his foreword to the new edition, Angell notes that while the book now calls up nostalgia for post-war Manhattan, White had put his own nostalgia for the New York of his youth into the essay.

Also Today Polite literature Strunk and White's much-revered "The Elements of Style" has sapped the life from American writing and spread the dominion of the New Yorker.

There's no denying the appeal of "Here is New York." To most of America, New York City embodies both romantic dream and urban nightmare, the place where we expect to find Fred Astaire taking to the floor in some Art Deco nightclub and a sap-wielding mugger waiting around every corner. White ameliorates those fears and substitutes the more realistic pleasures the city offers. Here is the threatening metropolis broken into small, self-contained neighborhoods; the immense city recast as a way to both lose yourself and find yourself; the embarrassment and out-of-place misery of tourists that results in charming faux pas; the most tender flower of young love blooming at a summer evening band concert. Anyone who wants to see New York but feels timid about actually braving it would read White and feel encouraged. And if you've moved to New York and are trying to feel your way into the city, you may take comfort in White's portrait of it as a place both open to the point of rawness and peculiarly insulated. At times White seems like the wise older uncle giving a blunt but not discouraging pep talk.

It's also possible, I think, never to have set foot in New York City and still recognize that "Here is New York" is almost completely phony. Certainly it's possible for outsiders to write intelligently about a place (isn't that what travel writing is all about?). But even a detached observer must be willing to engage with his subject if his observations are going to have any degree of authenticity. White doesn't. "Here is New York" is the work of a man who had decided long before he took the assignment that New York no longer held anything for him. That's discernible less in the sections where White laments the passing of the New York he knew (measuring its loss in newspapers that have folded, cops forsaking their beat for patrol cars, projects replacing slums, cabs replacing hackneys) than in the clichés he reverts to in order to describe what he sees. "A poem compresses much in a small space and adds music, thus heightening its meaning. The city is like poetry: it compresses all life, all races and breeds, and adds music and the accompaniment of internal engines." Is there a freshman composition teacher anywhere who wouldn't have at that trite metaphor like a bull sighting a red flag?

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