Knocking At The Gate

Writing in The Washington Post , Zachary Pincus-Roth explains that Eugene Levy, Martin Short, Andrea Martin, Victor Garber, and Paul Shaffer all appeared in the musical play Godspell . This is not too surprising, since that play has always been in production somewhere since it was created, and a great many well-known performers have appeared in it at some point in their careers. What's a little more interesting is that they were all in the same cast at the same theater at the same time. Full article with photographs, audio files, and videos here.

Writing in The Washington Post , Carlos Lozada reviews two new books on the threats to liberal democracy: Liberalism and Its Discontents by Francis Fukuyama and The Age of the Strongman by Gideon Rachma: When warring cultures and distant poles are the recurring metaphors for our politics, genteel calls for moderation may seem quaint. When authoritarian impulses are ascendant, wishing for self-restraint can feel foolish, a denial of reality and an abdication of responsibility. But what if moderation and restraint — the acceptance of limits in political life — are not just the right thing, but really all that is left to try? Full review here.  

David Mamet is inarguably one of our greatest living playwrights, and no small talent as a director. His boldness, his wit, his hard-nosed ability to show us our own demons and our own follies would suggest that anything at all he care to write would be worth reading. Writing in The Washington Post , however, Daniel Oppenheimer finds Mamet's new e-book ( Recessional: The Death of Free Speech and the Cost of a Free Lunch ) to be a disappointment: Telling an author what he should have written is one of the cardinal sins of book criticism. In the case of Recessional , though, it seems like the only critically generous thing to do. Because the alternative is to dwell on the book as it is, which is a pale facsimile of my hypothetical. “Recessional” isn’t really a book at all but a McBook. It’s a collection of disparate pieces, written mostly as columns for National Review, that are given back to us in book form only because the author has a big name and there’s some money to be m...

Photograph of Leonard Cohen in Toronto by Aaron Harris/AP Writing in The Washington Post , Diane Cole reviews Matti Friedman's new book Who by Fire: Leonard Cohen in the Sinai , which examines the famed singer-songwriter's decision to leave his wife and family and place himself in the Sinai desert during the Yom Kippur War of 1973. Privately, he lashed out at Suzanne, declared that he felt trapped by fatherhood and railed against his own failings with savage self-loathing. In the brutally candid pages from an unpublished manuscript that Friedman was given permission to excerpt here, Cohen described himself as “gritting my teeth from looking at the wreck of beauty and living inside of hatred and keeping to my side of the bed and always screaming no this can’t be my life inside my head.” He also wrote that as he listened, in October 1973, to reports of the outbreak of war between Israel and a coalition of Arab states led by Egypt and Syria, “I wanted to go fight and die...