NCW Libraries

A New York Times Book Review New & Noteworthy Title A collection of essays, letters and poems from E.B. White, "one of the country's great literary treasures" (New York Times), centered on the subject of freedom and democracy in America. "I am a member of a party of one, and I live in an age of fear." These words were written by E. B. White in 1947. Decades before our current political turmoil, White crafted eloquent yet practical political statements...

"The legacies of Joseph McCarthy, J. Edgar Hoover, Roy Cohn seem like they might be with us forever. Yet Christopher Elias finds in them startling new connections between gender, sexuality, and national security in 20th-century US politics--a paradigm he christens "security state masculinity." Elias integrates biographies of the trio with a history of gossip magazines and their tactics--such as insinuation, guilt by association, hyperbole, and alarmism,...

"'It was not the Baby Boomers who ushered in the first era of widespread drug experimentation. It was their parents.' Far from the repressed traditionalists they are often painted as, the generation that survived the second World War emerged with a profoundly ambitious sense of social experimentation. In the '40s and '50s, transformative drugs rapidly entered mainstream culture, where they were not only legal, but openly celebrated. American physician...

For the magazine's centenary celebration, an anthology of pieces from the early golden age of Vanity Fair. Editor Graydon Carter introduces these fabulous pieces written between 1913 and 1936, when the magazine published a murderers' row of the world's leading literary lights. It features great writers on great topics, including F. Scott Fitzgerald on what a magazine should be, Clarence Darrow on equality, D. H. Lawrence on women, e.e. cummings on...