Year: 1989

Once a social ideal for many Americans—progressive reformers, labor leaders, enlightened businessmen like Henry Ford, and some New Dealers—”the family wage” has fallen into disrepute in recent decades. Under the spell of egalitarian feminists, America’s political and cultural leaders now reject as hopelessly “sexist” the notion that a man should earn enough to support his...

I wanted to hate this sustained attack on the academy, which condemns everything to which I have dedicated my life, but I loved every word. This man is a truth-teller, therefore he is shrill, obnoxious, abusive, aggressive, offensive, and absolutely right. His indictment spells out the following academic felonies: “teachers who don’t teach, students who...

“The purity of a revolution can last a fortnight.” —Jean Cocteau Magisterial works of history are almost always informed by a tragic sense of life. Some recall epochal transformations that were as lamentable as they were inescapable. Still others dramatize the clash of two valid, but irreconcilable, principles. Among the latter, certainly, are the best...

When I was 15 years old I read a book that shattered me. The book was called SS im Einsatz (“The SS in Action”). It was a nonfiction book, a 600-page collection of documents—memos, orders, dispatches sent to the units of Waffen-SS, reports from the sonderkommandoes in action in Germany and elsewhere. There were some...

Any literary effort by David Slavitt is a complicated business for a reviewer. The complexity arises not immediately from the work itself, but from the prolific nature of Slavitt. To date, he is the author of 13 works of fiction, 14 books of poetry or translation, two books of nonfiction, at least eight pseudonymous novels,...

Like many Englishmen of his generation, Charles Darwin in his youth was an avid reader of William Paley’s The Evidences of Christianity (1794). As Darwin formulated his theory of evolution, he lost his faith in Paley’s argument that nature manifests God’s wisdom and foresight. “The old argument from design in nature,” he wrote in his’...

According to Leon Edel, the art of biography is a “noble” endeavor. But in our celebrity-crazed era, when prurient interests have supplanted respect for artistic accomplishment, the most popular biographies are those emphasizing lurid details. Joan Peyser’s psychosexual exploration of Leonard Bernstein anticipated Arianna Stassinopoulous Huffington’s even nastier and more controversial reproachment of Picasso. With...

Just what is a truly Christian, or biblical, view of politics and government, and what difference does it make for public policy? Doug Bandow, senior fellow at the Cato Institute, treats this and many other questions with a fresh perspective. Not to be pigeonholed, he works for a largely libertarian think tank but espouses policies...

In the general collapse of humane studies that marks the declining decades of the 20th century, a few areas continue to produce important scholarship. One of those fields is Roman history, especially the history of the Roman Republic. Emilio Gabba in Italy, Christian Meier in Germany, Ernst Badian and Togo Salmon in North America, to...

Exactly what Vice Presidents of the United States are supposed to do (and not do) always has been something of a political and constitutional mystery. As little as possible, is the recent election’s hint. But even in more demanding times the sanitized quip attributed to Texas’s John Nance (“Cactus Jack”) Garner, FDR’s first VP, that...

John Cardinal O’Connor, the distinguished and controversial head of the archdiocese of New York, has played an important role in affecting American politics, both inside and outside the Catholic Church. He is the pope’s point man in the battle for the soul of the US Church, and some say if an American were considered for...

It is a November evening in 1572. The Danish nobleman and astronomer Tycho Brahe is returning to his uncle’s house. As he notes that the clearer sky bodes well for resuming his observations after dinner, a strange, brilliant star suddenly catches his attention. In amazement, he watches it for some time, then: When I had...

The title of Sara Suleri’s memoir, “Meatless Days,” refers to the Pakistani government’s attempt at conservation following its independence from India in 1947. Tuesdays and Wednesdays were decreed “meatless,” meaning no meat would be sold and supposedly none eaten. What it actually meant, recalls Ms. Suleri, was that butchers only worked that much harder on...

This book gathers important information on the politicization of the schools, even the elementary schools, at the cost of facts—and flight from the world. The means of politicization: “nuclear education” is widespread, according to London’s rudimentary evidence. He contacted over 300 major school districts, and 16 of the 162 districts that answered had formal nuclear...

Charles Edward Eaton, in New and Selected Poems, as elsewhere, is a remarkable poet, a fine metrist and stylist, and a close disciple of Wallace Stevens in artistic skill and finesse as well as in theory and topics. Many a poet who buys whole hog and pen Stevens’ often-prevalent view of poetics (and thus poetry)...

Karlo Štajner spent seven thousand days in Siberia and learned nothing. Of course the reader is moved by the awfulness of spending all that time in the Gulag, but still he is left only with the experience of a man who survived. Yet, for better or for worse, for many of the named victims, Štajner’s...