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Indeed, one of the more valuable things about this book is that it helps dispel the myth of the liberal media. [Mark Crispin Miller] not only reminds us of the very obvious fact that the major media are owned by a small number of large corporations who, by and large, prefer \"the aggressively big-merger-friendly GOP to the less-aggressively big- merger-friendly Democrats.\" He also argues that right-wing pundits, like Bob Novack, George Will, William Kristol, Andrew Sullivan, Ollie North, Rich Lowry, Ed Rollins, John McLaughlin and Tony Blankley now proliferate, while those few supposedly representing a more liberal view, like Bill Press or Bob Beckel, tend to be lukewarm. Miller further notes the tendency of many media professionals to bend over backward so as not to be accused of \"liberal bias.\" The media, he contends, were quick to pick up stories of President Bill Clinton's scandals, such as Whitewater, but tended to dismiss rumors about any questionable business dealings in [George W. Bush]'s past. Following Election Day, while the votes were still being counted, Miller tells us, The New York Times advised [Al Gore] to pack it in. And once Bush took office, the major television journalists seldom alluded to the fact that he had not been elected in quite the usual fashion.

Our fifth-grade teacher read aloud to us every day after lunch. It was one of the most enjoyable parts of the school day. Thus we were introduced to Tom Sawyer, his Aunt Polly, Becky Thatcher, the Judge, and Tom's pal from the wrong side of the tracks, Huck Finn. Our teacher considered following \"The Adventures of Tom Sawyer\" with \"Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,\" but decided we were not yet old enough for it. In some ways, this was a pity, because Huck Finn's story, featuring a brilliant array of American dialects, begs to be read out loud. But our teacher may have been right about the novel's \"mature themes.\" From the evidence of some manuscript passages that Twain chose to leave out of the published work, the author himself saw fit to tone down some elements of Huck's story. Incorporating materials from the recently discovered Twain manuscript, the new \"comprehensive edition\" from Random House includes four passages Twain deleted from the published edition in 1885: Jim's account of his encounter with a cadaver, which took place some years before and which he tells to entertain Huck; a long description of the boastful carrying-on of some raftsmen; and two passages satirizing revivalist meetings.

Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) composed his magnum opus, \"The Divine Comedy,\" during his years of exile from his native Florence, from which he was banished in 1302 never to return (following a trial in absentia over trumped-up charges). Soldier, statesman, poet, scholar, Dante was in many respects a true Renaissance man, yet he also seems to embody the apotheosis of the civilization of the later Middle Ages. His most recent translator, Robert Durling, sees the \"Divine Comedy\" as the product of a unique moment in intellectual history. Dante's complete portrait of a unified spiritual, physical, and moral cosmos embracing heaven, hell, and purgatory, Durling contends, could only have been achieved before the dissolution of the grand medieval attempt to harmonize the classical philosophy of Aristotle with the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church. The luminously articulated summae of Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas are the necessary background for Dante's vividly detailed, intricately conceived vision of realms unseen. Dante's world is medieval: a pre-Copernican cosmos, with the unmoving earth at the center, heaven above and hell below. In viewing himself, the people he knew, and the historical world from the final perspective of the next world, Dante was continuing the medieval tradition. Yet Dante's way of presenting this world and this perspective is so intensely personal and radically original as to justify classifying this medieval thinker as a Renaissance mind and personality.

Discovered by the Fountain-of-Youth-seeking Spanish explorer Ponce de Leon in 1513, Florida remained largely undiscovered by vacationers and real estate developers for another 400 years. Even as late as the last decade of the 19th century, the lush, semitropical peninsula in the southeastern corner of the United States had much in common with the Wild West. The sparsely populated jungles and beaches of unspoiled (though also unair-conditioned) south Florida, circa 1890, are the setting of John Henry Fleming's gem of a first novel, \"The Legend of the Barefoot Mailman.\" There was in fact (as the reader is informed in a brief prefatory note) a hardy breed of postal carriers who plied their trade on foot, serving a handful of isolated settlers stretched out over miles of desolate, roadless beach routes in the general vicinity of what later became Miami. Young Josef Steinmetz and his pretty bride have just arrived in the tiny Florida town of Figulus (pop. 27) where Josef, who was born in Austria and who spent his young manhood in Brooklyn, now hopes to prove himself a true American pioneer. He is trying to start a citrus farm. His wife, appalled by Florida's insects, spends most of her time wrapped in mosquito netting, begging to return to Brooklyn.

Long before the advent of modern feminism, American men were struggling to figure out who they were. Although the \"sons of liberty\" had won a war to establish their country's independence, the new American man seemed far more worried about proving his manhood than his fathers before him had. Manhood meant many different things, as Professor [Michael] Kimmel illustrates with examples drawn from history, literature, and popular culture. To colonists asserting their independence from the mother country, it was a claim to the state of adulthood, of being able to govern oneself: Being a man meant not being a boy. Behind this was the democratic ideal of America as a land where each man could prove his worth. But the reality, as Kimmel demonstrates, was fraught with pitfalls and contradictions. By the early 19th century, manhood had become a cult, and the need to act in a way that others would regard as manly had begun taking its toll on American males.

Like the lepidoptera that fascinated him all his life, Vladmir Nabokov (1899-1977) underwent an astonishing metamorphosis, transforming himself from a Russian writer into one of the masters of mid-20th-century English prose. Yet throughout a life colored by vast changes in his external circumstances, he retained his core identity: a refined (rather than rugged) individualist and elitist par excellence, with a spirit perpetually open to the joy and wonder of human consciousness itself. Following a childhood and youth of wealth and privilege, Nabokov spent the second two decades of his life in European exile. Most of these years were spent in Berlin, where the aspiring young author managed to live almost entirely within the circle of his fellow Russian emigres: a kind of linguistic and cultural cocoon in which he was able to develop his skills as a Russian writer, contributing poems and stories to emigre journals like Rul (The Rudder). All but 11 of the 65 pieces in Dmitri Nabokov's new collection of his father's stories were originally written in Russian, products of this period of exile. Many were later translated into English and gathered into three collections that appeared late in his career: \"A Russian Beauty\" (1973), \"Tyrants Destroyed\" (1975), and \"Details of a Sunset\" (1976). Most of the stories originally written in English appeared in \"Nabokov's Dozen,\" which came out in 1958, three years after the novel that made his fortune: \"Lolita.\"

Under the pen name of Lewis Carroll (a Latinized inversion of his first and middle names), this shy, conscientious Victorian bachelor created the enduring children's classics \"Alice in Wonderland\" (1865) and \"Through the Looking Glass\" (1871) - not to mention the much-loved verse mock-epic \"The Hunting of the Snark\" (1874). Alice and her friends - the White Knight, the March Hare, the Mad Hatter, the Cheshire Cat, Tweedledum and Tweedledee, to name a few - became household words in Carroll's own lifetime, their likenesses appearing on stamp albums and cookie tins, their exploits translated into a multitude of foreign languages. Alice's fame has continued to spread in our own century, as everyone from Walt Disney to Jonathan Miller has come up with his or her own version of the story, with results ever \"curiouser and curiouser,\" as Alice herself was wont to remark. Carroll's inventive imaginings and his genius for wordplay have delighted generations of children; nor were they lost on such sophisticated admirers as James Joyce and Vladimir Nabokov. And, as Carroll's latest biographer, Morton N. Cohen, tartly notes in his introduction to \"Lewis Carroll: A Biography,\" Alice's adventures have also inspired some laughably misguided, not to say loony, disquisitions by literary critics who \"read\" her story as being about everything from the Oxford Movement to the author's own birth trauma.

Huston's heroine, Sylvia, is studying music at a prestigious conservatory in a rundown Baltimore neighborhood. She is terrified by her formidable teacher, the fierce, elderly Cornelius Tot, who has set her the task of learning Beethoven's last piano sonata, and who constantly denigrates her efforts as woefully inadequate. Sylvia draws some comfort from her fellow students: her closest friend, the self-sufficient, jazz-loving Peter, who is like the brother she never had; her high-spirited Ukrainian roommate Marushka; awkward, sensitive Jan, a Czech, who has a secret crush on Sylvia; and suave David from Israel, a good-looking ladies' man. Sylvia's own immaturity and inexperience seem crushing disadvantages in her mind, not only to her social self-confidence, but also, she fears, to her ability to understand the depths of the great music she is being asked to interpret. As Sylvia trembles on the threshold of becoming a grown-up, both personally and professionally, the reader is also introduced to two older women artists who have faced and continue to cope with similar pressures and challenges in their lives. Beautiful Moon Ja Koh, a former student at the conservatory now in her forties, has become a world-famous pianist, but at the cost of considerable sacrifice to her personal life. Moon Ja's teacher and friend, the gentle, kindly Katerina Haupt, also a fine musician, now in her sixties, wonders if she might have gone farther in her career had she been more disciplined, less tender-hearted.

Here's a paradox: In an age when the average attention span is said to have shrunk to the size of a sound-byte, there is still (apparently) a considerable market for hefty novels, chock full of abstruse erudition, written by an Italian professor of semantics. \"The Island of the Day Before\" is Umberto Eco's third novel, if \"novel\" is the word for this curiously archaic assemblage of forgotten lore. Certainly it is fiction, and beneath its static (not to say becalmed) surface, it even contains a story of a sort. But for the most part, this fiction is a \"novel\" in the original sense of the term: a novelty, a new combination of elements. European nations are staking claims in the New World, explorers are exploring uncharted realms, Catholics are fighting with Protestants, and philosophers are working at new ways of reading the Book of Nature. It is hard to tell science from pseudoscience, reason from sophistry, rhetoric from reality. And no one has yet managed to find a sure-fire method of calculating longitude at sea.