James Hill

Latest by James Hill in Chronicles

• Reviews

  October 1998

  An American Bhagavadgita

  For Paul Johnson, American history was a non-subject in his days at Oxford and its School of Modern History in the 1940's. "Nothing was said of America, except insofar as it lay on the margins of English history," Johnson writes.

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• Reviews

  September 1998

  Low-End Education

  Not too far from my house in Phoenix, Arizona, stands a Christian school that may just say everything about the educational reform debate in this country—and why it is so often impossible to make any sense of it, in particular.

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• Reviews

  May 1998

  The Kennedy Legacy

  More than three decades after his assassination, John Fitzgerald Kennedy's reputation continues to preserve its saintly luster, resisting the tarnish of time and truth. Those of us alive in 1963 will carry to our graves the shock of a young President cut down as he rode through the streets of Dallas by the senseless act of a lone gunman perched in a schoolbook warehouse.

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• Reviews

  March 1998

  Who's Cuckoo?

  Not too long ago, the London Daily Telegraph resurrected a 1962 essay by Ian Fleming on "How to Write a Thriller," in which the creator of James Bond said, "If you look back on the bestsellers you have read, you will find that they all have one quality: you simply have to turn the page."

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• Cultural Revolutions

  January 1998

  The Wilcox Shooting

  Larry Naman had had enough of arrogant and unresponsive politicians, and so he shot one. This past summer, the (media-described) drifter took aim and shot at the head of Maricopa County Supervisor Mary Rose Wilcox—a run-of-the-mill politician in Phoenix, known primarily for how loud and how often she can shout "police brutality."

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• Reviews

  June 1993

  Their Third World Problem—And Ours

  Procrastinating readers can pat themselves on the back if they waited to pick up David Rieff's Los Angeles: Capital of the Third World until it came out in paperback.

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• Cultural Revolutions

  March 1993

  "Only Outlaws Will Have Guns"

  Newcomers to Arizona, among whom I count myself, are sometimes startled to discover just how liberal are the gun laws in one of the nation's most conservative states.

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• Reviews

  February 1993

  Watergate: The Continuing Story

  One of the problems with treating an event like Watergate as history is that, for most of us, it isn't. The "third-rate" burglary that became a constitutional crisis leading to the only resignation of a sitting President in our history may be two decades old, but it is still very much with us.

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• Reviews

  November 1992

  Wild About Harry—Again

  I was born in 1946, right in the middle of Harry Truman's accidental and tumultuous first term as President. I have no memory of the man until one early November morning in 1952, when my mother and grandmother were discussing the election of Dwight Eisenhower.

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