Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #1534 in Magazine Subscriptions
- Format: Magazine Subscription
Product Description
Features critical commentary on diverse aspects of our culture, reappraisals of important literary and scientific figures, a continuing series of articles about great university teachers, and a selection of poetry, memoirs of other places and times, and book reviews.
Customer Reviews
Most helpful customer reviews
27 of 27 people found the following review helpful.
Will the real American Scholar please stand up
By Bryan Byrd
Sometime in 2004, I found my first issue of 'The American Scholar', and I was amazed at how fascinating such a wide ranging hodge-podge collection of essays (essays!) could be. I read it from cover to cover - alongside the reviews of literature and art and memoir, here were topics I generally had no interest in (Science, travel, medicine), written by experts for laymen, entertaining and engaging and informative. I waited for the next issue, glad of what I had discovered.Except then I found out the editor, Anne Fadiman, was stepping down and the magazine was going in a different direction. What's worse, it was clear from the editorial that Ms. Fadiman was not happy about the situation, and hadn't really even been told *why* she was being asked to leave.Uh-oh, I thought.Maybe it only seems this way, but I wonder if I haven't fallen into a pattern where I catch the tail end of a wonderful era, only to witness the gradual slide toward the lowest common denominator. The new editors, as promised, began to alter the course of the magazine, slowly, or at least slowly enough so that as I subscribed for the first time (with reservations), I only noticed a few slight changes. There wasn't enough to be disappointed in - yet.The stated purpose of the new American Scholar overlords was to bring a current event slant to the magazine, to address the issues of the day, to weigh in where weighing in by the Phi Betta Kappa society was needed - at least from the perspective of the Phi Betta Kappa society. But only a fraction of each issue would be devoted to this new penetrating analysis. The rest of the magazine would follow the successful format laid out in past years - stellar articles about any and all subjects under the sun.What the hey, I thought, it's their magazine, they have that right - and even though the tone (which I felt had been pleasantly neutral before) sounded a little more shrill, I stuck with it. The 'Scholar' became my brother's annual Christmas gift to me, and I still enjoyed it for the most part.But there were more changes - aesthetic mostly, but the current events slant slipped further and further to the political left, and even though I never was a fan of the Iraq War or President Bush, if I wanted to hear insightful (or incendiary) commentary regarding either one, I had Harper's magazine or Al Franken available and who could do it better anyway. And who would have thought that adding color photography to the cover (and abandoning the delightfully archaic and iconic imagery of "The Pen") would, instead of making the magazine stand out, blend it into the already brightly colored spectrum of limited shelf space?Two more years, and two more subscriptions, went by. The 'Scholar' added fiction - to make up for 'The Atlantic' dropping theirs. (This decision never made sense to me. If 'The Atlantic' didn't find it profitable, they why would the 'Scholar'?) I did look forward to this change, but the fiction is assigned, not solicited (which, realistically, is probably how most of the bigger magazines handle it, regardless of what they say about looking for new writers), and, as I expected, reflected a stable of current, multicultural, predictable authors. No surprise discoveries here!I thought, during 2007, the last year I carried a subscription, that the focus of the magazine was approximately half and half - split between current events and 'scholarly' articles. Additionally, the editors fell under the spell of the current trend of magazines that waste the first two or three pages with sidebar and paragraph articles, presumably to break the reader in slowly because we surely don't have the attention span necessary to dive right in. Whatever. I did not bother to ask for a renewal.I bought the winter 2009 issue to see if the 'Scholar' had gone all the way to the bottom, or was, Helter-Skelter, trying to get back to the top of the slide. After reading it, the only thing I could think of was the phrase my son uses when he's deeply ambivelent about something. "Meh". Still about one half of the magazine concerns itself with current events, or else the subject matter, perhaps inherently neutral, seems to be infused with the author's bias, as though they are staking out a position. Regardless of the topic, it came off as stale and stifling. The other half, still refreshing and fascinating, contained the reviews of literature and art. The 'Scholar' is the only magazine that does them the way I think they should be done - one article = one in-depth review.A note to those considering subscriptions - the stated subscription price on this site does not match the price printed inside the magazine - which is substantially lower. Substantially lower, but in my opinion, still not low enough to lure me back. I can only keep hoping the content will do that.
24 of 25 people found the following review helpful.
BEWARE NEW EDITOR 2005
By renbur yar
The first issue under the guidance of its new editorial staff showed what the PBK board must have had in mind. The magazine has adopted now a current-events bent, in place of the more insulated material that many found so appealing before. Photos are now part of the format- not good photos, or color photos, or anything like that, just waste-of-space photos. Oh yeah, in a nutshell, the pen is gone from the cover. The changes bring a once-great journal down to a level of mediocrity that results from trying to compete in a game that is not their own. I will not be renewing.
25 of 29 people found the following review helpful.
The End of a Good Thing
By Michael Yates
I had subscribed to the American Scholar for many years for the fine essays. I've let my subscription lapse now that the new editors have dumbed the magazine down. I can't imagine who they're trying to appeal to. The current issue's recourse to Kitty Kelly was the straw that broke the camel's back.
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