Andrei Navrozov’s newest book of reminiscences is intended to be the literary and photographic proof of his “internal exile.” By this term, he underscores his distance from the present age, in which philistine housewives have seized control of our social and political institutions and mass culture has become increasingly degraded. In this present time of...
Most Rockfordians are familiar with the garishly modern Winnebago County Courthouse at 400 West Main Street, which is easily recognized by its filthy cement exterior and offensive “contemporary” style. It was not that much better at the turn of the 20th century, as far as I knew, until I received a copy of Eric A....
“The eternal gods do not lightly change their minds.” —Homer, Odyssey Rodney Stark is considered by many to be the greatest living sociologist of religion. Generations of English-speaking students have used his textbook Sociology, now in its eighth edition. Stark was one of the founders of the theory of religious economy, which replaced the earlier...
The recent battle over the removal of a 5,280-pound monument to the Ten Commandments placed in the lobby of the Alabama Supreme Court by Chief Justice Roy Moore has deep religious and civil roots stemming from the Protestant Reformation and provides an excellent historical study of religion, law, and public policy in America. Two recent...
Victor Davis Hanson, a professor of classics at California State University, Fresno, writes often and writes well. I have two of his books on ancient Greece. He is the only author who has ever explained to me how difficult it was to wreak permanent agricultural devastation on a typical Greek city-state: Pulling out grape vines...
Dr. Clyde Wilson’s new gathering will be of particular interest to readers of this journal, as some parts of it have appeared in these pages and as he has for years maintained a special relationship with Chronicles. Yet I hasten to add that the compelling quality of these essays speaks broadly to the most vital...
Dispatches From the Muckdog Gazette by Bill Kauffman New York: Henry Holt and Company; 207 pp., $22.00 A decade ago, a friend of mine was working for a prestigious law firm in Washington, D.C., which had decided to institute a “paperless” office. The process would take a couple of years; in the interim, to smooth the...
Social Life and Moral Judgment by Antony Flew New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction; 179 pp., $34.95 Antony Flew is one of Britain’s most lucid analytical philosophers and the most skilled demolisher of the myths of social justice that his country has ever produced. His new book, published in the United States, should prove of great interest...
“Debate is masculine; conversation is feminine.” —A. Bronson Alcott For decades, a massive problem has been aborning in all Western countries: the increasingly difficult-to-ignore presence of ever-growing and restive ethnic minority groups alienated from the majority communities surrounding them. These disparate groups—emboldened by our enervation and in thrall to ethnocentric demagogues masquerading as “antiracists” and...
The sheer inanity of so much fiction today sends us necessarily to the past, and not always to Balzac and Trollope. If we are looking for something readable and American and modern, then this gathering is just the thing. Indeed, for sheer readability (if not for the finest quality), James M. Cain is hard to...
In 1994, Lois Lindstrom, an American, moved to Stockholm. There she befriended Karin Wiking, then in her early 70’s, and from their regular conversations grew this very personal book about Mrs. Wiking’s life and experiences. Like so many others during and right after World War II, Wiking ably served her country and the dispossessed of...
One of the pleasures of fiction is the opportunity that novels, short stories, and epic poems give us to escape from our own everyday world into an alien world of gods and heroes (as in the Iliad) or knights and wizards (Tennyson’s Idylls), English villagers (in Hardy’s Wessex), or Mississippi rednecks and redskins (of Faulkner’s...
The 1930’s were marked by intellectual trauma as well as by economic hardship. What had caused the apparent catastrophic crash of “capitalism”—collapse of equity, vanishing demand, and vast unemployment? The desire to diagnose the cause and prescribe a remedy created many ideas and movements. Some achieved success of a sort, and others went unheeded. The...
Anti-Catholicism is far from new to America, but there certainly is a new anti-Catholicism in America. In the mid-19th century, anti-Catholic abolitionists, Know-Nothings, evangelicals, and Republicans railed against what the 1856 GOP platform derisively called the “twin relics of barbarism, slavery and polygamy.” Today, anti-Catholic feminists, homosexuals, liberal Protestants, and Democrats hold fast to the...
Vladimir Nabokov—like Hemingway, Lorca, and Borges—was born in 1899, began life in the stable Victorian era, lived through the horrors of the Great War, and came to artistic maturity in the 1920’s. Driven out of Russia by the revolution of 1917, exiled in Berlin and Paris for the next two decades, Nabokov reached New York...
“Always do what you are afraid to do.” —Anonymous Fall 2000 already seems like a long time ago, and it actually is. Perhaps I remember in a haze of nostalgia for that period, a brief entertainment of hope for the American polity, one which was soon snuffed in a blizzard of dimpled chads and a...
To a woman who has spent several decades of her life in New Orleans, a city that lies mostly below sea level, any trip out is a journey to higher ground. And so Catharine Savage Brosman’s title works for a book of essays mostly about journeys away (though she includes a nice piece on New...
Greek teachers are frequently asked which text they recommend for introductory Greek. Although many new textbooks have come along since 1928, when An Introduction to Greek by Henry Crosby and John Schaeffer was first published, none has rivaled, much less surpassed, this old warhorse. It is not that the rivals are without merit. James Allen’s...
Give Isaiah Berlin this much: He had the good sense to choose Henry Hardy as an editor and literary trustee. Since Berlin’s death in 1997, Hardy has moved at a reasonable pace in releasing Berlin’s unpublished papers, but he has taken great care to do it right. A case in point is last year’s Freedom...
“An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson Hitler & Churchill—Secrets of Leadership is made from Andrew Roberts’ recent BBC television series, Secrets of Leadership, in which he sought to tease out the management secrets of four famous charismatic leaders—Hitler, Churchill, Martin Luther King, Jr., and John F. Ken-nedy. With this...
There will always be tension between America’s experiment with democracy and hierarchically structured Roman Catholicism, because the two proclaim different concepts of freedom. While the former is grounded in the individualism of Protestantism and, more recently, of secularism, the latter regards true freedom as being circumscribed by claims imposed by considerations of the common good...
Gavin Menzies, a retired British naval officer and submarine commander, has advanced a startling thesis. He believes that, in 1421-23, a large Chinese fleet circumnavigated the world and skirted the continents of Africa, South America, Antarctica, and North America. Before you dismiss his contention as the latest multicultural myth, like claiming black Africa as the...
In April 1970—between the fall of Prince Sihanouk’s government and the American and South Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia—the young Sean Flynn, war photographer and son of Errol Flynn, deliberately drove into a Vietcong roadblock in Cambodia. He wanted to report the war from the communist side but was captured and accused of spying for the...
Since she died in 1964 at the age of 39, Flannery O’Connor has not receded from literary awareness nor from a larger consciousness we might call philosophical or spiritual or religious. Her place in the literary canon is secure in part because her reputation rests on more than the mere acknowledgment of authorities, many of...
In theory, it seems like a good idea. The corpus of historian John Lukacs’s work is so rich and has grown so large that those who have just discovered it may be uncertain where to start. His magnum opus, Historical Consciousness, alone has gone through three editions, all of which are worth reading as separate...
Do not look for last year’s best novel piled high in a fancy stack at the Books-A-Million or B. Dalton, with the belles lettres of Tom Clancy or John Grisham, because the best novel of 2002 was written 48 years ago. The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, by Sloan Wilson (recently deceased), hit the...
“The earth opened her mouth, and swallowed them up, and their houses, and all the men that appertained unto Korah, and all their goods.” —Numbers 16:32 The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 convinced Voltaire (who didn’t need convincing to begin with) of the nonexistence of God. The Great California Earthquake, when it comes (as it must),...
Faith in technology is one of the central tenets of the modern age. Becausetechnological development is equated with progress, the technological world-view has been adopted by virtually every ideology and political regime the world over. All technology is good; more is better. Those who criticize this orthodoxy are seen as delusional or, worse, as dangerous. ...
In previous books, now classics of travel writing, Paul Theroux described his long train journeys through India and Russia, South America, and China; his ramblings around England and the Mediterranean; his paddling through Oceania. More interested in people and landscape than in history and art, Theroux combines description and interpretation with social criticism and political...
I am frequently asked to recommend the best book on ancient history or moral philosophy or the French Revolution, and, since I do not believe there is one best book on anything, I usually content myself with saying what not to read: Do not read Donald Kagan or Paul Rahe on the ancients; and do not...
One of the great ironies of the late-1990’s stock-market bubble is that more Americans followed the advice of Wall Street scam artists than that of Omaha billionaire Warren E. Buffett, the best money manager in the second half of the 20th century. The “New Paradigm” fooled much of America; Buffett and his partner, Charlie...
Did Pat Buchanan’s politics fail? That is not a question Joseph Scotchie’s biography explicitly seeks to answer, but it is one that a reader of the book cannot help asking. As the Reform Party’s candidate, in his third and last presidential bid, Buchanan earned less than one percent of the vote. In his exposition of...
“America is not to be Rome or Britain. It is to be America.” —Charles Beard William Kristol boasts that September 11 proves the neocons to have been prophets because, after the Cold War, they alone warned that the world had become a more dangerous place, not a safer one. He and his crowd cite three...
X.J. Kennedy can be said almost to be a popular literary figure. (A New Jersey native, Joseph Charles Ken-nedy, born in 1929, adopted his pen name upon settling in Massachusetts.) This is not at all to say that he belongs to popular, or mass, culture. But his accomplishments in verse have been widely recognized, and deservedly...
As I grow older, I think less and less about trying my hand at fiction. For an old man who has kept his eyes open and made a few mental notes of what he has seen, the great temptation is to write a memoir. Even a good novel may never find a publisher, while even...
“There is no use in excellent laws, even ones approved by all active citizens, if the citizens have not been habituated to and educated in the city’s way of life.” —Aristotle, Politics 5.9 In Céline’s nightmarish masterpiece, Journey to the End of the Night, the hero reaches America in a slave ship. He escapes, but...
We hear much about misogyny (woman-hating) these days but far less about misandry (man-hating). Spreading Misandry, coauthored by a woman who has written extensively on women’s issues, identifies negative stereotypes and double standards that harm not only men but society as a whole. Paul Nathanson and Katherine K. Young document the hostility toward, and contempt...
Edward Abbey used to say that he took great pride in getting more radical as he got older—no easy task for the anarchist son of a communist father, but an impeccably American maturation just the same. As the American Empire staggers into senseless senescence, what patriot, whether populist, reactionary, or just cantankerously American, isn’t being...
Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (formerly the Holy Office) since 1983, has exercised enormous influence within the Catholic Church. In late 2002, he was elected dean of the College of Cardinals, a largely ceremonial and honorary position to be sure, but one that reflects his continuing influence...
Lord Byron was the most fascinating literary figure of the 19th century. Fiona MacCarthy’s solid and competent biography covers the ground in great detail (the deformed foot, the scandalous exile, the endless wandering, the early death in Greece) but fails to engage our interest or do justice to its subject. Desperately straining to say something...
Herb London’s newest book, a relentlessly critical view of American morals and culture in the 1990’s, makes two pivotal observations. First, the moral deterioration that journalists associate with the Republican “decade of greed” (the 80’s) actually took place, partly thanks to the media, in the 90’s. Second, the major impact of the Clinton presidency was...
Now, before I have my say about David L. Ulin’s new compendium of writing on Los Angeles, there are just a few things that need to be said about my own “Hollywood years,” because I get tired of being asked about that episode by nosy people who are just plain confused about the facts. So...
“The day of small nations has passed away; the day of empires has come.” —Joseph Chamberlain Simon Schama is university professor of art history and history at Columbia University and the author of histories and art histories, such as his 1995 Landscape and Memory and his two works on Dutch art and culture, An Embarrassment...
Randall Jarrell was born in Nashville in 1914 and grew up in Tennessee and Southern California. He studied under poet and critic John Crowe Ransom at Vanderbilt University and followed him to Kenyon College, where he lived in Ransom’s attic with the young Robert Lowell and wrote his thesis on A.E. Housman. Encouraged by Allen...
David C. Downing’s study of C.S. Lewis and his conversion to Christianity in his early 30’s offers more than the title might suggest. What we are given is not a repetition of the well-known narrative from Surprised by Joy, in which Lewis recounts his journey from youthful atheism to Christian belief 15 years later. Nor...
“It was wonderful to find America, but it would have been more wonderful to miss it.” —S.L. Clemens In California, two brothers ages 20 and 15, murdered their mother and then cut off her head and hands, after which they were seen trying to unload a package with a foot sticking out of it into...
Literary biography is often an opaque filter for the work of modern writers. The interference comes not so much from the cockeyed analysis we may encounter of an artist’s life but from the mass of irrelevant detail. We read the novels and short stories of Ernest Hemingway and J.D. Salinger but also know the events...
Americans have lost the habit of constitutional government. Judges hand down commands derived from their own personal revelation, in the teeth of law and majority rule, and are tamely obeyed by millions. A President, recently sworn to uphold the Constitution of the United States, announces his intention to commit the blood and treasure of the...
“Empires are not built in fits of absent-mindedness.” —Charles A. Beard Described by the author as a “venture in contemporary history,” American Empire is also an in-depth study of the post-Cold War foreign policies of the last three presidential administrations, all of which Andrew Bacevich believes sought to preserve and extend an American empire. Bacevich,...
Both of these books are written by young, self-styled conservatives; both demonstrate indisputably the unfounded charges made against the “right” by the media and academics; both easily devastate the biased and factually inaccurate statements about Republicans, conservatives, and the American past and present that emanate from the cultural left. The TV personalities Ann Coulter goes...