The Atlantic | Feb 2001 | In This Issue

Contents | February 2001

The Atlantic Monthly | February 2001

In This Issue

n this month's cover feature, "Bill Clinton and His Consequences," fourteen contributors look back on the Clinton presidency.

The saga of the kidnapping of the beloved Indian actor Rajkumar by the infamous bandit Veerappan transfixed southern India (and much of the rest of the world) for more than three months before the actor was released, last November. The author and physician Abraham Verghese ("The Bandit King and the Movie Star") returned to India, where he was educated, to report on the drama as it unfolded. Verghese is the author of the memoirs My Own Country: A Doctor's Story (1994) and The Tennis Partner (1998).

In a review of the book Family (1994), by Ian Frazier, The New York Times commended the author for the "antic sense of fun he brings to whatever he writes." This month Frazier, in "Walking Tour," guides us through the familiar streets of a city that's nowhere to be found. Frazier's books include Great Plains (1989) and Coyote v. Acme (1996), for which he won the inaugural Thurber Prize for American Humor. Our December, 1999, cover story was taken from his book On the Rez (2000).

Electroconvulsive therapy is perhaps the most controversial and misunderstood treatment in psychiatry, despite its effectiveness in treating a number of mental illnesses. In his first article for the magazine, the Atlantic staff editor Daniel Smith ("Shock and Disbelief") looks at the science of ECT and reports on the efforts of an unlikely trio of activist groups (including an outgrowth of the Church of Scientology) to ban the procedure outright.

Louise Erdrich ("Sister Godzilla") won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1984 for Love Medicine. Her novel The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse will be published in April.

Wislawa Szymborska received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996. Her poems in this issue, "Openness" and "Commemoration," will appear in Miracle Fair, a collection of Szymborska's poetry, translated by Joanna Trzeciak, to be published in April.

As cycles of building and demolition accelerate nationwide, it is growing increasingly difficult to preserve the past—and to decide what's worth saving. In a dispatch from Columbus, Ohio, Wayne Curtis ("The Tiki Wars") reports on the battle to save a kitsch artifact: the only tiki restaurant listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Also this month: Peter Maass, from Belgrade, on what new problems the post-Milosevic era may pose for the writers of Serbia; Francis X. Rocca, from London, on shopping for aristocratic titles; Richard Rubin, from Washington, D.C., on the 1.5 million square miles of territory the United States seems to have misplaced; and Jeffrey Tayler, from Yakutsk, on the true meaning of "economy class" air travel.

Stephen Bodio ("Sovereigns of the Sky") traveled to the high valleys of Central Asia to hunt by means of trained eagles in the company of Kazakh tribesmen. Bodio, a falconer, is the author of numerous books, including On the Edge of the Wild (1998).

Fears of contamination and pesticide-resistant bugs are leading many gardeners to shun conventional pesticides and turn to insects for help. Thomas C. Cooper ("It's a Bug-Eat-Bug World") profiles Mike Cherim, the owner of The Green Spot, a biocontrol-supply company in New Hampshire. Cooper recently left his post as editor in chief of Horticulture, where he spent twenty-three years, to launch the new magazine The Gardener, which will make its debut this spring.

Richard Todd, a former executive editor of The Atlantic, is at work on a book about the search for authenticity in contemporary American life—an endeavor that, perhaps counterintuitively, inspired his recent visit to Las Vegas ("Las Vegas, 'Tis of Thee"). Todd finds that the city deserves the one thing Americans tend to deny it: respect.

Before World War II most American weddings were modest affairs. More recently the "white wedding" has grown into an extravaganza fueling a $70 billion industry. Caitlin Flanagan ("The Wedding Merchants") surveys the recent bumper crop of wedding-etiquette and -survival guides.

Evelyn Waugh is celebrated for his trenchant satires and the elegiac Brideshead Revisited. Far less well known is the Sword of Honour trilogy, even though many consider it to be Waugh's masterpiece. On the occasion of its reissue, the novelist Penelope Lively ("A Maverick Historian") takes a second look. Lively was the winner of the 1987 Booker Prize for her novel Moon Tiger. Her most recent novel is Spiderweb (1999).

Hardly the square that he has come to represent, Bing Crosby was the first major entertainer to achieve the blend of black and white aesthetics that underlies much of American pop culture. So argues Gary Giddins in his new biography of Crosby, reviewed in this issue by James Marcus ("'The First Hip White Person'"). A critic, a translator, and a novelist, Marcus is currently the literature and fiction editor at Amazon.com books.