Category: Bookshelves

Wagnerism in European Culture and Politics; Edited by David C. Large and William Weber; Cornell University Press; Ithaca. “We recently had a very serious conversation on the subject of Richard Wagner,” Debussy once remarked to Pierre Louys. “I merely stated that Wagner was the greatest man who ever existed, and went no further. I didn’t say that...

Peter Handke: The Weight of the World; Translated by Ralph Man heim; Farrar, Straus & Giroux; New York. This combination of writer’s notebook and personal diary by the German novelist, playwright, poet, film writer and director Peter Handke is 243 pages of random perceptions, most of them just a few lines long. They were written between November 1975 and...

Megan Marshall: The Cost of Loving: Women and the New Fear of Intimacy; G. P. Putnam’s Sons; New York; $14.95. Megan Marshall’s book attests to the resiliency of nature and common sense in human affairs. The Cost of Loving is a chapter in the rise and fall of the feminist ideology. Feminism, like many ideologies, had (Marshall uses the past tense) the characteristics...

Martin Gottfried: Jed Harris: The Curse of Genius; Little, Brown; Boston. The man who called himself Jed Harris was the leading producer and director of the Broadway of the 20’s and 30’s. The staccato pacing of Broadway (1926) won him instant attention and a place on the cover of Time magazine. It turned the American...

Ernest van den Haag: Smashing Liberal Icons: A Collection of Debates; The Heritage Foundation; Washington, DC. When the adversaries are aggressive and the topics provocative, debates are stimulating entertainment. And, too, many vigorous minds have shared Samuel Johnson’s relish for “talking for victory.” But for participant and auditor alike,  the excitement is in being there—in the tones...

Charles Murray: Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950-1980; Basic Books; New York. Charles Murray’s book is a study of some of the biggest, and perhaps the least excusable, social problems facing American society. Losing Ground is based on a mass of data, and its message is clear and unmistakable: the benevolent social policies adopted in the 1960’s have...

Joyce Carol Oates: Last Days; E. P. Dutton; New York. Joseph Campos-De Metro: The Slugger Heart & Other Stories; Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; San Diego. At 47, Joyce Carol Oates has to her credit more than 40 books,  including 16 rather fat novels and nearly as many collections of not-so-short stories. Ms. Oates is also, however, one of this country’s...

George Goldberg; Reconstructing America; Wm. B. Eedernabs; Grand Rapids, MI. Many years ago Leo Strauss remarked that the Supreme Court is more likely to defer to the contentions of social science than to the Ten Command­ments as the words of the living God. Strauss was, of course, basing his obser­vation on the use of social...

Dinesh D’Souza: Falwell, Before the Millennium; Regnery Gateway; Chicago. The Rev. Jerry Falwell is one of the most frequently pilloried men in Amer­ica today. Journalists and liberal politi­cians are fond of comparing him to Hitler, Khomeini, and Jim Jones and brand him a “racist,” “fascist,” and “intolerant bigot.” Ultrafundamental­ists like Bob Jones denounce him as...

James L. Tyson: Target America: The Influence of Communist Propaganda on the U.S. Media; Regnery Gateway; Chicago. Most Americans understand that “news” from Tass is about as reliable as promises from real-estate speculators. Both are capable of paving swampland with hyperbole. What relatively few of us realize, however, is to what extent American news reports are swayed...

The Christian Vision: Man in Society; Edited by Lynne Morris; The Hillsdale College Press; Hillsdale, MI. “Where there is no vision,” says Prov­erbs, “the people perish.” Because the vision provided by Judeo-Christianity has been fading for some time on America’s campuses, college graduates informed by a sense of purpose and meaning have become rare. As...

Jean-Claude Courdy: The Japanese: Everyday Life in teh Empire of the Rising Sun; Harper & Row; New York. Matthew Perry sailed into Tokyo Bay in 1853. President Fillmore was interested in putting an end to Japan’s isolation policy. Commodore Perry stuck around the harbor until the empire agreed to open trade negotiations. A trade agree­ment...

J. William T. Youngs: Eleanor Roosevelt: A Personal and Public Life; Little, Brown; Boston. No First Lady in this century has so fully captured the American imagina­tion as Eleanor Roosevelt–only Jac­queline Kennedy has even come close. During the dark hours of the Depres­sion and World War II, Eleanor be­came a symbol of hope for millions...

Philosophy and Science Fiction; Edited by Michael Philips; Prometheus Books; Buffalo, NY. It is not exactlv a new idea to consider the philosoplical dimensions of science fiction. This anthology, which seems designed for one of Prof. Philips’s fresh­man survey courses, contains a few good, if obvious, selections from Stani­slaw Lem, Borges, and Karel Capek in...

Mary Douglas: Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo; Ark/Routledge & Kegan Paul; London. The history of most religions can be written as a struggle between High and Low Church. There is always a tension between those who adhere to ritual and tradition and those who seek salvation only from...

Gertrude Stein may be the only official member of “The Lost Generation” who has not been disemboweled by literary analysts. Stein’s circle-biographer James R. Mellow called it a “Charmed Circle” in the title of his 1974 book was not restricted to Hemingway, Sher­wood Anderson, and other literati. Gertie, as she was known to some of...

The History and Impact of Marxist-Leninist Organizational Theory: “Useful Idiots,” “Innocents’ Clubs,” and “Transmission Belts” by John P. Roche; Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis, Cambridge, MA. The joke is as old as Marxism in power: Lenin (or Stalin or Khrushchev or Chernenko) shows his beautiful Crimean villa, his fleet of limousines, his army of servants,...

Endless Enemies: The Making of an Unfriendly World by Jonathan Kwitny; Congdon & Weed, New York. During the formative years of the American republic, Alexan­der Hamilton proposed that a national debt would be beneficial since it would tie the wealthy, the lenders, to the fledgling government, the debtor. Hamilton doubtless would regard a trillion-dollar national...

The Persistent Prejudice: Anti-Catholicism in the U.S. by Michael Schwartz; Our Sunday Visitor Press, Huntington, IN. Catholicism is so pervasive in America that it is taken for granted as somehow normal. Schwartz traces hostility to Catholicism from its Reformation roots in England, where it was identified with “foreigners” and political conspiracy. Trans­planted to the New...

Required Writing: Miscellaneous Pieces 1955-1982 by Philip Larkin; Farrar Strauss Giroux, New York. Philip Larkin is a rare thing among literary journalists—his own man. When he edited the Oxford Book of Twentieth Century Verse, he filled it with his own eccentric choices, many of them rhymed and often by uncelebrated poets. His own verse, as...

John M. Allegro: The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Christian Myth; Prometheus; Buffalo, N.Y.  John M. Allegro has distin­guished himself as an editor and commentator of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Unfortunately, his erudi­tion did not prevent him from writing a very foolish book. Allegro believes that the re­semblance between the Scrolls and certain Christian practices...

Herbert Kohl: Growing Minds: On Becoming a Teacher; Harper &Row; New York. The author of The Open Class­ Room offers some progressive advice on the craft of teaching. Much of his argument is cast in the form of a personal memoir. To parents of school-age chil­dren, the history of Kohl’s teach­ing career will read more like a...

Richard John Neuhaus: The Naked Piblic Square: Religion and Democracy; William B. Eerdmans; Grand Rapids, MI. The worst thing about the wonderful but secondary and nonsalvific blessings of Chris­tianity is that once those who enjoy the divine bestowals have forgotten their source, these blessings are set up as objects of new and destructive forms of...

Morris Janowitz: The Reconstruction of Patriotism: Education for Civic Conscoiusness; University of Chicago Press; Chicago.  In some ways nothing seems more un-American than military life. The hierarchic authority, the strict discipline, the regimenta­tion of appearance and manner all appear antithetical to the modern American notion of individual rights. However, in Tbe Reconstruction of Patriotism Morris...

Zbigniew Lewicki: The Bang and the Whimper: Apocalypse and Entropy in American Literature; Greenwood Press; Westport, CT. Every instant, each of us moves closer to the End. It may be a result of “the big one,”or it could simply be that our biologi­cal software program has run its functions. Every instant there is more disorder....

In a full page ad in The New York Tinzes Book Review for Sex & Destiny: Tbe Politics of Human Fertility by Germaine Greer (Harper & Row; New York) a cer­tain Fay Weldon’s words from a piece in the London Times are quoted in type that’s 1/2-inch high: “One of the most important books to be...

Scott Donaldson: Fool for Love, F. Scott Fitzgerald; Congdon & Weed; New York. Love, popular culture endlessly reminds us, makes the world go round. But since the cultural sphere now seems to be wobbling erratically in its orbit, a sensible observer might suspect that something is amiss in this rotary force. As citations in the...

Malcolm Bradbury: The Modern American Novel; Oxford University Press; New York. Serviceable handbooks to literature are always handy to have around the house or office; those that are pithy rather than prolix are even superior. Malcolm Bradbury, himself no mean novelist, examines, in a mere 186 pages (excluding back-of-the­-book materials), American fiction from the 1890’s...

James J. Thompson, Jr.: Christian Classics Revisited; Ignatius; San Franciso. Among the ends to which writers may put their words is that of leading the reader toward the divine Word of Christian belief. In the secularized world of modernity, such efforts, even when practiced with subtlety, insight, and creative intelligence receive remarkably little attention, however....

Max Apple: Free Agents; Harper & Row; New York. Picture a man. About fivc­ eight-and-a-half in height, wire­ rimmed glasses, curly hair, salt­-and-pepper beard, blue brushed­-cotton shirt, loose navy tie, khaki pants, and Top Siders. Picture him in two dimensions–as if he is a life-sized cartoon, like a Lichtenstein. Once the image is fixed, imagine...

Richard Morris: Dismantling the Universe: The Nature of Scientific Discovery; Simon & Schuster; New York. In “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” Eliot’s title character asks, or muses, at one point, “Do I dare/Disturb the universe?” That question is but one of many in the poem; it is not, then, unlike the two found in one...

Peter Hutchinson: Games Authors Play; Methuen; New York. During a conversation with Jorge Luis Borges at the Ingersoll Prizes ceremony in Chicago last December, we were informed that, in his estimation, “Literature is supposed to be enjoyed.” He added, “It is fun, is it not?” There was what can only be described as a whimsical...

George Johnson: Architects of Fear: Conspiracy Theories and Paranoia in American Politics; Jeremy P. Tarcher; Los Angeles.  Before the world became a smaller place as a result of com­munications and transportation webs, apocryphal tales about magical and mystical powers emanating from sages in Africa and the Orient permeated the nooks and crannies of civilized environments....

Joe Haldeman: Worlds Apart; Vikings Press; New York. It’s widely reported that in the event of a nuclear holocaust, the highly adaptive life form known by the sobriquet “cockroach” will inherit the remains. Joe Haldeman, in this science fiction sludge, posits a variation on this theme: the order Blattaria, in 2085, will include bipedal crea­tures...