Readings

The Best of ‘The Nation’

Thunder’s Mouth Press/Nation Books, 607 pp., $16.95 (paper)

The 89 pieces from throughout the 1990s collected in this book remind me of the pleasures — including, sometimes, teeth-gritting rage — that arise from reading this journal that for 135 years has served as a crucible of independent Left thought in this country, and that continues to mix it up with every opponent on the horizon.

Unsurprisingly, a chief opponent has been the GOP. This collection leads off with the hilarious “Prez v. Uptight Re: Boldness Gap,” an imaginary diary of a George Bush administration insider that chronicles Bush’s triangulations with the press over his “image”; it reminds us that Clinton was hardly the first president to worry about his polls. A great David Corn piece from 1998 is titled “66 Things to Think About When Flying Into Reagan National Airport.” In six brief, verbless paragraphs, Corn damns the Reagan era as thoroughly as could be done in such a short space. And Molly Ivins’ report from the 1992 Republican National Convention, “Notes From Another Country,” is priceless.

Prior readers of The Nation will be unsurprised that its writers also do not spare the Democrats. Perhaps the most compelling example here comes from longtime Nation firebrand Christopher Hitchens. His article details Gov. Bill Clinton’s supremely cynical refusal to grant a stay of execution to a brain-damaged Arkansas death row inmate during the campaign season of 1992. Throughout their articles, the writers show no hesitation to skewer Democratic absurdities whenever appropriate.

There are also numerous pieces that remind us of The Nation‘s prominent place in the politics of the Left in America — I mean that group of folks far to the left of the Democratic party. Harvard professor Cornel West provides a probing overview of the career of seminal American socialist Michael Harrington, columnist Ellen Willis argues on behalf of a radical Left that operates beyond the bounds of the mainstream political status quo, and filmmaker Michael Moore drolly flays affluent and academic leftists who have abdicated any meaningful relationship to working-class labor-union leftists in this country.

The Nation deals with much more than politics: There are pieces here on literature, on the various arts, on many facets of international and domestic affairs. Particularly strongly treated are issues of poverty and race and the myriad social, political, and physical ramifications of the AIDS epidemic. In some cases, these concerns flow together into compelling essays, like in Edmund White’s “Journals of the Plague Years,” which treats the flowering of literature written by gay men during the worst periods of the AIDS crisis. Reading pieces like this one, one senses that the writing is not merely interesting but also important.

There are leading novelist-essayists including E. L. Doctorow, Salman Rushdie, and Gore Vidal. There are cultural critics like Barbara Ehrenreich and Tom Frank and activist academics like Edward Said and Martin Duberman. There are also excellent poems from the likes of Philip Levine, W. S. Merwin, and Wislawa Szymborska. It is, in short, a collection of extremely high assay.

As I read an anthology, I like to jot down favorite authors and titles. If I can find a problem with the pieces in this book, it’s that they produced a reading list more massive than I could address in an entire year. This is a problem I can live with. Less easy to accept is the poor copy editing of the book — it is as though the book were rushed to press before it received that last, thorough read-through. Since the acceptable rate of copy-editing error in a professionally produced book is zero, the dozen mistakes I found came to be a major distraction. Here’s hoping that enough folks fed up with the status quo — both of politics and of magazine publishing — will take up this book that the folks at The Nation will need to do another printing, complete with corrections.

This article appears in July 20 • 2001.