Our sense of what American English is has upended our relationship to articulateness, our approach to writing, and how (and whether) we impart it to the young, our interest in poetry, and our conception of what it is, and even our response to music a...
According to the 2003 data from the U.S. Census Bureau, 25.8 percent of [New Orleans] population lives below the poverty line... This is more than twice the national average, but is close tot he percentages in other American cities such as Miami (28....
The new fashions sold in department stores had thrown skilled American seamstresses out of work, you see. They’d been displaced by immigrant girls doing piecework for a pittance in terrible sweatshops. I refused to patronize a garment industry that...
Even if through simple living and rigorous recycling you stopped your own average Americans annual one ton of garbage production, your per capita share of the industrial waste produced in the US is still almost twenty-six tons. That's thirty-seven ti...
A slow but steady transformation of deviance has taken place in American society. It has not been a change in behavior as such, but in how behavior is defined. Deviant behaviors that were once defined as immoral, sinful, or criminal have been given m...
American literature has, since the time of the Puritans, featured the jeremiad as a prolonged complaint, a prophet's indictment of his society characteristic of work such as the muckrakers' novels or Allan Ginsberg's “Howl.” Doctorow struggles to...
Americans, though apparently impressed by ghastly sentimentality and outrageous hypocrisy, are by nature much more politically cynical than Canadians. In their longer history they have had much more to be cynical about. They demand a vulgar show, enj...
Author says that, while Eisenhower had other intellectual mentors, he learned how to lead men from Gen. Walter Krueger. Krueger was the first American enlisted man to rise to four-star general, and he so identified with those he led that he once invi...
Sandra L. West and Aberjhani have compiled an encyclopedia that makes an important contribution to our need to know more about one of modern America’s truly significant artistic and cultural movements. It helps us to acknowledge the complexity of A...
I was at a dinner party many years ago,sitting along from Tom Stoppard, who in those days smoked not just between courses,but between mouthfuls. An American woman watched in disbelief. "And you so intelligent!" "Excuse me?" said tom "Knowing those th...
The first supermarket supposedly appeared on the American landscape in 1946. That is not very long ago. Until then, where was all the food? Dear folks, the food was in homes, gardens, local fields, and forests. It was near kitchens, near tables, near...
The most basic barrier was language itself, very few Americans in Iraq whether soldiers or diplomats or news paper reporters could speak more than a few words of Arabic. A remarkable number of them didn't even have translators. That meant for many Ir...
When I got to the States and started going to an American high school, which I did for an extremely short time, I thought everyone around me was insane, the way they talked about their parents. I thought the parents were insane too, the way they hand...
Today's youth cannot escape the shadow of racism that has been passed down organically from parents and others who cling to a distorted image of American history, one informed by, and articulated from, a worldview permeated by white privilege. [sic],...
Suppose each of us make up a list of, say, fifty or more books that we believe should be in the library. Then , when Robinson goes to the bookseller in Philadelphia let him start with the first of each of our chooses, then the second of each, and so ...
no one wanted to look at the common evils of society. Very few were willing to put aside their own pursuit of happiness long enough to consider the effects of greed and jealousy around them. From what she'd seen, humans were essentially troubled. For...
...the total number of pregnancies in which powerful and dangerous drugs are used is 60 percent, or nearly two-thirds of all births. It is rediculous to think that two-thirds of American women have such lousy uteruses that they must be whipped into s...
the mangrove killfish, lives in South American and southern US coastal swamps that can either dry up or become so toxic that the fish has to find refuge in the mud or by flipping and jumping across land. Amazingly, its skin and gills change so the ki...
My dad win, I silently countered, even as I smiled sweetly. I couldn’t wait to spike the ball right through her block, no matter how tall she was. In health class we’d learned that if Barbie were human, she’d be six feet tall and weigh one hund...
The ruins stretch from the river to the base of that mountain over there, about half a kilometre.’ ‘How far is that in regular measurements?’ Percy asked. Frank rolled his eyes. ‘That is a regular measurement in Canada and the rest of the wor...
I again flourished my papers: “Here’re my credentials from the Coalition Administration.” The American scrutinized the papers, shook his head in amazement, and smiled. “A South African,” he said. “You’re sure a long way from home.” He...
