Amazon.com Review
Literary, brainy, and left-leaning, Harper's Magazine is an American institution (the first issue was dated June 1850). Its clean, type-heavy design shouts "serious readers only": many pages are two columns of text, period, and the illustrations are mostly art (often photographic) and artistic adornments. The reading, though, is what matters. It's substantive and often sublime. Along with lengthy, thoughtful, frequently controversial articles on politics and culture, you'll find essays, short fiction, in-depth reporting, and a few book reviews. Bylines routinely represent leading writers and thinkers of the day. Standing features include the much-copied but rarely equaled "Harper's Index," in which statistics tell stories; "Readings," a section of excerpts ranging in length from a few lines to thousands of words; and "Annotation," in which a real-life document is reproduced and "explained," usually to devastating political or cultural effect. Each issue is a full meal for the mind. --Nicholas H. Allison Product Description
This magazine is edited to cover current social, political, cultural, scientific and economic issues. It also includes reporting, essays, fiction and memoirs by distinguished writers and promising new voices. It regularly features a statistical index, short cuts from various international texts and close analysis of current pieces of media.
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Harper's Magazine
- Magazine: 0 pages
- Publisher: Harper's Magazine
- Label: Harper's Magazine
- Format: Magazine Subscription, Print
- Studio: Harper's Magazine
- Average Customer Review:
based on 51 reviews
- Sales Rank in Magazines: #34
Avg. Customer Review:
0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Customer Rating: 
Summary: The Sky is Falling 2008-08-11
Comment: I used to read Harper's when I was a cynical 20-something. Now that I'm a somewhat less cynical 30-something, I just can't take the nearly hysterical atmosphere of gloom that pervades it. Life is grim for many around the world--always has been, always will. Wallowing in that grimness isn't in anyone's interest. Additionally, Harper's doesn't give voice to alternative political viewpoints--if they had their way, the editors would pack the courts, congress, and White House with liberals no matter the cost. This is a pluralist society and a magazine with the intellectual firepower of Harper's at its disposal should be strong enough to admit a range of views. Let the Harper's politburo have their funereal fun and read The New Yorker instead.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Not for flip-throughs 2008-04-29
Comment: I frequently change magazine subscriptions just to see what's out there. Harpers, however, is a staple and for the simple reason that its writing is the best and the most varied in terms of length and subject matter. The real measure of its success is that I will wade into articles, memoirs and discussions, whatever the subject, and find I come away with something to talk about with friends instead of an hour spent with teaser paragraphs and no payoff. You know the feeling from coffee table mags where your eyes wind up tired and inside your head a dull tom-tom begins to beat . . . Harpers is a strange amalgam of irreverence, analysis, personal revelation and humor that puts it somewhere between the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker and Mother Jones--without the branding that the others cordon you with. Check it out and be sure to read the pieces not usually on your checklist. They'll take you places you haven't been.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Simply the Best 2008-03-11
Comment: Harper's is simply the best magazine around--thoughtful, critical, varied, insightful, challenging. It refuses to bow down and to pretend that the emperor is not naked, and yet it does not have a shrill or grating tone. In a world gone mad, it is the voice of reason and sanity, liberal in the finest and most liberating sense of the word. It is the only magazine I give as gifts--as of 2008, to seven different people, who have all come to love it, and to look forward to it, as much as I do.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Brain Food 2007-12-03
Comment: After reading my first issue of Harper's, I felt like I had just spent time with some very intelligent people ... excellent writing.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Still, It's a Good Magazine 2007-05-18
Comment: Although at times the advertising can be questionable (the recent issue includes an ad placed by Chevron), the content is well worth the low price of a subscription. There are few magazines left that include material of such depth, and the broad scope of its content is both suitable and satisfying.
One important benefit Harper's provides to its subscribers is access to the full content of all arhived issues back to 1850. This alone is worth the price of a subscription.
One more note: I hope it is appropriate to suggest subscribing directly, as this will knock off quite a few weeks of nail-biting anxiety as you impatiently and obsessively check your mailbox, waiting for the first copy of your subscription to arrive.
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