December 1999/January 2000 - Boston Review

December 1999/January 2000

A debate on standards in public education, with Deboarah Meier and responses by Abigail Thernstrom, Gary Nash, Theodore Sizer, and others. Marjorie Perloff on poetry and cultural studies. Dmitri Tymoczko on Beethoven and Kant. Edward McCaffery on the case for a progressive consumption tax. Michael Greenberg on Robert Stone. Plus, W.S. Merwin translates Dante’s Purgatorio, fiction by Pauls Toutonghi, Scott Saul on the American teenager, and more.

Forum

Educating a Democracy

STANDARDS AND THE FUTURE OF PUBLIC EDUCATION

DEBORAH MEIER

RESPONSES FROM ABIGAIL THERNSTROM, BOB CHASE, GARY B. NASH, LINDA NATHAN, RICHARD J. MURNANE, WILLIAM AYERS, AND THEODORE SIZER. DEBORAH MEIER RESPONDS.

Essays

In Defense of Poetry

Put the literature back into literary studies

Marjorie Perloff

The Sublime Beethoven

What the composer and Kant have in common

Dmitri Tymoczko

Real Tax Reform

The case for a progressive consumption tax

Edward J. McCaffery

Fiction

Regeneration

Winner of the Seventh Annual Short Story Contest

Pauls Toutonghi

New Fiction Forum

American Faith, American Violence

Robert Stone and the the delusions that shape our lives

Michael Greenberg

Western Voices

Kent Haruf, Plainsong, The Tie That Binds, and Where You Once Belonged

Laura Hendrie

Voices from the Old Country

Leslie Epstein, Ice Fire Water

Judy Budnitz, If I Told You Once

Paul Gediman

Judith Grossman, How Aliens Think

Susan Daitch

Kathryn Davis, The Walking Tour

Edwin Frank

Walter Mosley, Walkin’ the Dog

Peter McCarthy

Nonfiction Reviews

Thomas Hine, The Rise and Fall of the American Teenager

Mike Males, Framing Youth

Scott Saul

Microreviews

Poetry Reviews

John Ashbery, Girls on the Run

John D’Agata

Gustaf Sobin, Towards the Blanched Alphabets

Andrew Zawacki

Richard Howard, Trappings

Benjamin Ivry

David Lehman, The Last Avant-Garde

Michael Tyrell

Microreviews

Poetry

Highway to English

Suzanne Wise

The Origin of Olive Oyl

Denise Duhamel and Maureen Seaton

The Kitchen of Francesca and Paolo

Joshua Corey

Rerum Novarum

Gerardo Deniz

Romulus Augustulus

Gerardo Deniz

Making History

Jeanne Marie Beaumont

Dante, Purgatorio, Canto XXIX

Ttranslated by W. S. Merwin

On Film

The Artist as Survivor

Wu Tian Ming’s King of Masks

Alan A. Stone

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