Category: items new in print

“The terrorists not only murdered but also mutilated their victims. They brained infants and burned men alive in front of their wives. In response, some on our side also began to kill and soon convinced the government to declare war. Anyone killing a terrorist would receive a bounty from the state. Only a small subset of our community remained calm enough to wonder why the terrorists were angry. To the consternation of their compatriots, this subset arranged a conference, where the terrorists explained why they had turned to violence: twenty years earlier, at the behest of a family whose role in our government was all but dynastic, we had taken their land by fraud. . . .”

My review-essay about Charles Brockden Brown’s Revolution and the Birth of American Gothic by Peter Kafer is in the summer 2005 issue of Common-Place.

My review of Michael Cunningham’s Specimen Days is in the 13 June 2005 issue of New York magazine.

My article about Bill Condon’s biopic of sex researcher Alfred C. Kinsey appears in the Arts and Leisure section of the New York Times on Sunday, 3 October 2005.

UPDATE, 4 November 2004: In my article about the movie Kinsey, I wrote that Fritz von Balluseck (Friedrich von Balluseck), a pedophile and former Nazi with whom Kinsey corresponded, was “tried for murder.” This is probably not true. German newspaper articles from 1956 and 1957 indicate that von Balluseck was for a time a suspect in the murder of a girl named Liselotte Hass and that several months later he was convicted of sexual abuse of a number of children, but I have not found any evidence that he was ever tried for murder. I am working with the Times on a correction, but it is taking much longer to prove that I was wrong than it did to make the error in the first place (it’s the famous difficulty of proving a negative), and so I’m posting this provisional correction in hopes that journalists working on pieces on Kinsey in time for the movie’s release by Fox Searchlight next week will land here through Google and avoid repeating my mistake.

FURTHER UPDATE, 17 November 2004: The Berlin Landesarchiv has the legal records of von Balluseck, and they confirmed this morning that von Balluseck was not charged with or tried for the murder of Liselotte Hass. I’ve alerted the Times, and a correction will be forthcoming.

My review of Cornel West’s Democracy Matters appears in the New York Times Book Review of 12 September 2004.

My review of Suzanne Lebsock’s A Murder in Virginia: Southern Justice on Trial and Ann Field Alexander’s Race Man: The Rise and Fall of the “Fighting Editor” John Mitchell Jr. will appear in the 15 July 2004 issue of the New York Review of Books.