You have probably seen those arches of tubular steel designed to span garden walks. They are usually covered with some kind of green permanent coating, and your imagination almost certainly runs to splendor, but let me suggest restraint. No sooner did I acquire...

A long-awaited, necessary and useful "Guide to Public Art in Greater Boston" is incomplete, and for a happy reason. Marty Carlock has crammed into 184 pages crisp analyses of 300 notable pieces of art and sculpture from Plymouth to Newburyport. The guide, published...

Tucked inside a $14.4 billion blueprint for the rebuilding of New Orleans is a proposal for a Hurricane Katrina monument on a grand, "Homeric" scale, like the Arc de Triomphe in Paris.The idea is to honor Katrina's victims and the spirit of New Orleans, and...

["Arch of Triumph"] is a novel of Europeans between wars yet forced to be perpetually at war, a novel that is animated by a spirit of savage disillusionment toward this last war before it had even begun, foreseeing the war's caprices and disasters. "Arch of Triumph" is a part of Erich Maria Remarque's somber, stylized panorama of modern Europe's broken and dispossessed, begun in "All Quiet on the Western Front," continued in "The Road Bac...

In our own time there have been few, if any, parallels to the instantaneous success of "All Quiet on the Western Front"—and as the author of that novel, Remarque has ever since 1929 enjoyed international fame. It was not easy to place him as a literary figure, or even to balance the literary merits of his triumphant first novel against the courage of its humanitarian appeal. Remarque's art had not broadened in his later efforts; the book preceding ["Arch of Triumph"...

Mr. Remarque in all his works has shown his fierce concern with the major issues of our time, war and collapsing social structures and the tragedy of exile. Arch of Triumph is a story of exiles in Paris in 1939, which illuminates with masterly skill all the despair and misery, the sense of impending doom, the folly, futility and fear of that lull before the storm. It is a sad and melancholy book, a tired and disillusioned one. But because it is steeped in a stoic atmosphere of fortitude in adversity, it is ...