A boy grew in Brooklyn -- University of Michigan -- Belief in America (from Situation normal) -- A modest proposal for the pacification of the public temper -- Concerning the boom -- The bored and the violent -- The Nazi trials and the German heart -- Guilt and Incident at Vichy -- The battle of Chicago : from the delegate's side -- Kidnapped? -- The Opera House in Tashkent (from In Russia) -- Making crowds -- Miracles -- What's wrong with this picture? -- The limited hang-out: the dialogues of Richard Nixon as a drama of the antihero -- Rain in a strange city -- On true identity -- A genuine countryman (from In the country) -- The sin of power -- The pure in heart need no lawyers (from Chinese encounters) -- After the spring -- Suspended in time -- The night Ed Murrow struck back -- Excerpt from Salesman in Beijing -- Tennessee Williams' legacy: an eloquence and amplitude of feeling -- The face in the mirror: anti-semitism then and now -- Thoughts on a burned house -- Dinner with the ambassador -- Ibsen's warning -- Uneasy about the Germans: after the wall -- The measure of the man -- Get it right: privatize executions -- Lost horizon -- The good old American apple pie -- The parable of the stripper -- Let's privatize Congress -- On Mark Twain's Chapters from My Autobiography -- Clinton in Salem -- Salesman at fifty -- The Crucible in history -- The price-the power of the past -- Notes on realism -- Subsidized theatre.