W.H. Auden is famous for poems about totalitarian evil, but he also wrote frivolous verse when in the mood. In assembling As I Walked Out One Evening, Edward Mendelson, the executor of Auden’s estate, sifted through the vast corpus of his work, picking out “lullabies, limericks, and other light verse” (to quote from the front...
Mr. D’Souza might have reconsidered the title of his book, for he is not describing the end of racism. Glenn Loury recently observed a predilection for “end” themes in recent neoconservative tracts: Fukuyama with the end of history and D’Souza with the end of racism, Loury explains, have taken Hegelian (or pseudo-Hegelian) phrases to express...
This volume is particularly notable for readers of this journal for two reasons: First, some of it has appeared in these pages, and, secondly and more importantly, the truths it conveys have been a part of the core vision of Chronicles as, literally, a magazine of American culture. But I think too that there are...
“Satiate with power, of fame and wealth possessed, A nation grows too glorious to be blest; Conspicuous made, she stands the mark of all. And foes join foes to triumph in her fall.” —George Crabbe, Thelibrau In the last year, Michael Lind has emerged as the new wunderkind of American political discussion. He was the...
If the best-seller lists are any guide, something odd is stirring in American attitudes toward religion, and specifically toward the Judeo-Christian tradition. For decades, it has been a commonplace that religious belief represents a critical demarcation line in class and intellectual belief, and that educated elites not only do not believe, they do not care....
American literature, Wallace Stegner once observed, is not so much about place as motion: we are a restless people, and we write restless books that hurtle us from A to B with a blur to mark our passage. Discounting Stegner’s own lovely evocations of place in books like Wolf Willow and Grossing to Safety, one...
It is a rare polemicist who makes a successful career in fiction. But in The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957)—and with all the subtlety of dropping a grand piano on her reader’s head—Ayn Rand conveyed her harsh philosophy to a broad audience and gamed what has invariably been described as a cult following. Rand’s...
During many an evening conversation, Sam Francis, Murray Rothbard, Lew Rockwell, and I have dwelled on a particular topic with relish: Who was the first neoconservative? Our responses varied, depending on the latest neoconservative outrage and which obnoxious historical personalities we were then reading about. After looking at John Ehrman’s book and the summer issue...
In 1954, the Supreme Court held in Brown v. Board of Education that the state-sponsored segregation of children in public schools was a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment, and thus unconstitutional. The Court reasoned that segregation “generates a feeling of inferiority . . . that may affect their [black children’s]...
“A genera] who sees with the eyes of others will never be able to command an army as it should be.” —Napoleon I In Senate hearings in 1991, General Al Gray, the Marine Gorps Commandant, was asked to describe the role of the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1987 mandating “jointness,” or the operational integration of the...
In his last novel, In the Tennessee Country, published the summer before Peter Taylor’s death on November 2, 1994, a man, the narrator’s cousin, “chucks” his family, his home, and his identity, and disappears. What is important about Cousin Aubrey, however, is not so much his mysterious absence from the narrator’s life as his lingering...
“I came to cast fire upon earth; and would that it were already kindled!” —Luke 12:29 In order to mark the 15th anniversary of Pope John Paul II’s election to the Papacy, Italian Radio and Television commissioned Vittorio Messori to conduct a live television interview with the Pope. It must have seemed a good idea...
“The whole Sherlock Holmes saga is a triumphant illustration of art’s supremacy over life.” —Christopher Morley It was the spring of 1893, and Arthur Conan Doyle was plotting murder. “I am in the middle of the last Holmes story,” Doyle wrote to his mother, “after which the gentleman vanishes, never to return. I am weary...
“The results of political changes are hardly ever those which their friends hope for or their foes fear.” —T.H. Huxley In political circles, it has become fashionable to talk about “culture wars.” The discussions usually touch on the issues of abortion, euthanasia, sexual orientation, school prayer, gun control, and welfare, among others. These are issues...
The topic of Poe and Borges is as compelling as it is restricted, and Professor Irwin has made sure we understand that what is narrow may also be deep. Indeed, he peers through an aperture which in his perspective opens to take in a universe. But before I speak to that fullness of vision, perhaps...
A national poetry in three languages is hard to describe, much less anthologize, and, in fact, the situation is even more complex since so much good Scottish poetry was written in Latin, a point made emphatically by Tom Scott in the introduction to his Penguin anthology. Roderick Watson, in editing this wonderful and exasperating volume,...
This new biography of one of the great “fixers” in American political life, James F. Byrnes, creates the impression of an American Ozymandias, proclaiming by example the ephemerality of human greatness. Byrnes and his political colleagues did mold the world in which we live long after the last of them died; yet the scene of...
Despite the relentless efforts of diehard revisionists, those intellectual terrorists who seem to be bound and determined to explode and reduce to rubble the best of our Western heritage, the ancient and honorable vocation of scholarship continues, patiently adding to our sum of knowledge and appreciation and perhaps even understanding of the living past, undeterred...
“The other side lost, but did we A win?” So asks Ronald Steel concerning America’s foreign policy. Obviously the world long familiar to us has suddenly collapsed. “Of course there is a victory,” writes Steel in reference to the United States’ triumph in the Cold War. “But what do we do with it?” No stranger...
“The call for free trade is as unavailing as the cry of a spoiled child for the moon. It never has existed; it never will exist.” —Henry Clay During the closing days of the 1993 congressional debate over the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), 300 of the nation’s leading economists, including two Nobel Laureates,...
“Reaction is the consequence of a nation waking from its illusions.” —Benjamin Disraeli In the 1960’s, when those of us who are now “of a certain age,” as the old-fashioned French expression goes, were young, we used to talk about the Revolution. I remember one excited student at little Haverford College, on the Main Line...
Justice Hugo Black remains something of an anomaly in the history of the Supreme Court. A textualist who was contemptuous of the arbitrary mysticism of substantive due process, he nevertheless advocated the most extreme position on the issue of incorporating the Bill of Rights against the states through the 14th Amendment, a revolutionary doctrine that...
Among conservative constitutional scholars, George Carey best demonstrates the knack of remaining perpetually relevant. From his collaboration with his own mentor Willmoore Kendall in the 1960’s through his many writings on the federalist papers over three decades, some included in this volume, Carey has worked to show the value of the American founding to our...
“She was ‘The Woman’ the press whispered about, with Dr. Martin Luther King on that last tragic trip to Memphis,” reads the back-cover blurb in oversize type. No, not Irene Adler, but the “first black woman senator from Kentucky.” Georgia Powers has finally come forward and described her many trysts with King, recounting how she...
While reading this wide-ranging collection, I was struck once again by the similarities between Theodore Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. Both were prolific writers of books and essays that incorporate history and political thought with personal experience. And while the prime motive of both men was to earn extra income, each had an energetic style that...
“When we get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, we shall become as corrupt as Europe.” —Thomas Jefferson This snowball of a book, gathering mass as it accelerates, is studded with accretions and revisions. A work of cultural criticism rather than of mere literary or even social history, it seems to...
This volume is the last substantial legacy provided by the author’s will which, operating on the principle of time-release, has already resulted in the publication of the Diary of H.L. Mencken and the availability of many useful letters and papers. While Thirty-five Years adds little if anything to what was already known of Mencken’s life,...
Societies, as much as individuals, need role models. For good and for ill, our cultural tradition has been influenced by the figures of Achilles and Odysseus, placed at the center of our moral imagination by Homer almost three millennia ago. The shaping power of the tradition is clearest where there has been no direct influence,...
The mystery novel, to borrow a line from Original Sin, has all the virtues of its defects. “The mystery,” Baroness James explained in a recent Washington Post interview, “deals with the planned murder” and is thus confined to a certain formulaic structure in which a detective protagonist confronts an often unsavory lot of suspects, all...
This book seems to be a coffee-table job for golfers, and no doubt there are many who will enjoy it that way. Some may even fancy that they will learn something about golf from it, but I think that something will be limited. No, this openly closed book reveals nothing that was not for years...
A popular belief about the founding era is that America was a society of atomistic individuals. All that Americans demanded, according to myth, was that their life and property be protected by government; the remainder of their affairs was to be their own concern, Barry Alan Shain, in his new book The Myth of American...
The War for Southern Independence reminds us of many things, not least of which that there were once many men who were willing to take up arms to defend what they believed to be their birthright as Americans. It was not by chance that the Great Seal of the new nation featured George Washington, for...
Let us at the outset dispose of one of the major criticisms of Sovietology and Sovietologists: their failure to predict the end of Soviet communism and the collapse of the Soviet Empire. It is one of the strange curiosities of Soviet history that the communist leaders could not predict events in their own backyard, either....
Devil Dogs forced to watch their Corps become a corporation—Total Quality Management, affirmative action, sexual harassment awareness training—will draw inspiration from E.B. Sledge’s book, originally published in 1981 and soon to be reissued. More than any tactical manual, With the Old Breed reveals what success under fire is all about: fortitude, loyalty, discipline, determination—no matter...
Michael Kazin (editor of Tikkun, son of a New York man of letters, Alfred Kazin, and professor of history at American University) has produced a book on populism which highlights his own concern: namely, that “left populism” is losing its appeal in America. For Kazin this is a lost opportunity. At the end of the...
The Supreme Court, as Stephen Presser laments, has wandered far off course; increasingly its Justices have taken to reading their own preferences and prejudices into the Constitution, thereby abandoning their solemn obligation to act as its guardians by interpreting its provisions in accordance with the basic values and intentions of the Framers. What is more,...
“A nation scattered and peeled, . . . a nation meted out and trodden down.” —Isaiah Like Romans in ancient times, Americans are losing their country to immigration, and few seem to know it. One who does know is Peter Brimelow, himself an immigrant and recently naturalized citizen. In his book Alien Nation, he more...
As long as there have been Christians, they have searched for the “real Jesus.” In the last two centuries, this search has been directed toward discovering the authentic historical personality who supposedly lies behind what are seen as mythical accretions, a quest that has inevitably led to conflict with fundamentalists who resent the application of...
Gene Roddenberry was a hustling ex-cop who wanted to strike it rich in television, and he did, with a series called Star Trek, which he once described (before his slide into self-mythicizing and lucrative licensing deals) as “Wagon Train To the Stars.” His public image has heretofore been that of the atheistic Gentle Ben of...
“Happiness is at once the best, the noblest, and the pleasantest of things.” —Aristotle The claim to objectivity on the part of reviewers is, if not ill informed, precious. I make no claim to offer the one true reading of Edward O. Wilson’s autobiography. However, by my scheme of reckoning, he is one of the...
One of the casualties of the current culture wars is the Western. No other genre, it seems, is so politically incorrect. The Western is accused of racism, sexism, and imperialism—three strikes and you’re out. These charges receive sophisticated expression in Jane Tompkins’ West of Everything, published under the prestigious imprint of Oxford University Press. According...
“Harry’s gone mad,” yelled Mrs. Barnes. “I just saw him running around the side of the house with a gun, muttering something about the plumbers.” Young Robert ran outside, and there found his dad, distinguished historian and man of letters, lying on his belly, blasting away with his old Army rifle at the foundation of...
Importing Revolution tells the sad and tragic tale of how the Ford Foundation has funded practically every pro-immigration group in America for the last 30 years. It is hard to read this book without concluding that the Ford Foundation has misused and abused its original purpose, as well as its tax-exempt status, by advancing the...
In the middle part of this century one of the main staples of the Anglo- American reading public was the historical novel, or romance. Such “swashbucklers” were not great literature, but they had their virtues. In the hands of skilled writers like C.S. Forester or Kenneth Roberts, they introduced a great many people to some...
Every well-read person used to know Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, and, knowing that collection, knew who Richard Savage was—or at least knew who Richard Savage told people he was. Richard Savage was a minor poet and convicted murderer, a charming rascal and rackety man about town entirely lacking normal instincts of prudence and self-preservation....
“There is only one step from fanaticism to barbarism.” —Diderot In Defense of Elitism joins what is now a spate of books documenting the madness of contemporary “political correctness.” It is an amusing, readable, and journalistic work, full of the most delightful anecdotes about the absurdities of our times, unusual in that it locates the...
What does it mean to be a citizen? The answer we give will depend on the nation we live in and on the age of the world in which we find ourselves. The French used to define citizenship not, as the English and Americans do, by the accident of birthplace, but by descent. Citizens were...
Romano Guardini (1885-1968), a Roman Catholic priest and professor of Christian philosophy at the universities of Breslau, Berlin, Tubingen, and Munich, was a year old when he emigrated with his parents to Germany from his native Italy. Returning to his homeland after many years, Guardini found himself confronting the physical reality that he had both...
In this final book of his splendid career, Christopher Lasch seeks to answer two questions, one that is increasingly heard in political debate, the other still too subversive for consideration in polite society. The first is “What’s wrong with America?”—an issue not too far removed from the “Condition of England” so lengthily debated by Disraeli...
“I grew up a few miles from the X county this book deals with,” anthropologist Jane Adams writes in her account of rural Union County, Illinois. “My family’s farm, although dating only to the early 1940’s, is now essentially abandoned, the community emptied.” Her book describes this loss, serving both as indirect autobiography and scholarly...