In the Victorian era, High Churchmen castigated Darwin as a materialist who would reduce men to mere monkeys, and earnest materialists enunciated a vision of scientific progress that, as it were, only incidentally drained the universe of purpose. Darwinian propaganda has been with us for 100 years, a mechanical explanation not only of the origins...
The recent death of Robert Mitchum reminds us not only of his appearance in one of the best film noirs. Out of the Past, but of his impersonation of the detective Philip Marlowe in the remake of Farewell, My Lovely and The Big Sleep. Mitchum once claimed that, in his early days, he tended bar...
The theory that “big emerging markets” (BEMs) m the Third Worid will be the driving force of the world economy, and thus of worid politics, has been at the core of the Clinton administration’s foreign policy. As Undersecretary of Commerce for International Trade during President Clinton’s first term, Jeffrey E. Garten was the principal author...
“Democracy is more cruel than wars or tyrants.” —Seneca The correspondence on the origins of the Cold War between John Lukacs and George Kennan, who have been friends for more than four decades, is not entirely unknown to fans of either. Much of it was printed last year in American Heritage,...
Naomi Wolf is nice. She is attractive, she has a daughter, she is even married. To a man. A far cry from the rabid man-haters associated with modern-day feminism. Her voice has been hailed as one of moderation; she celebrates “power feminism,” professing that women are not helpless. She goes out of her way to...
We live in an age when biography flourishes, contrary to earlier expectations. The reason for this is the decline of the novel and the rise of popular interest in all kinds of history, and biography belongs within history. The problem is “all kinds”: for appetite may be fed by a wide variety of junk food....
“A people still, whose common ties are gone; who, mixed with every race, are lost in none.” —George Crabbe That Americans of different ethnic or religious origins intermarry surprises no one—half of Japanese-Americans, more than half of all Catholics, nearly three-quarters of Italian-Americans, 84 percent of Polish-Americans, and so on. But...
Charles Hamilton Houston, dean of the Howard Law School, taught his students to view law as an instrument of social engineering, and Thurgood Marshall, one of Houston’s top students in the early 1950’s, never forgot this basic lesson. As a leading advocate in the nation, Marshall served as a catalyst for social change as he...
“Every honest man is a prophet.” —Blake Whittaker What is now known as the Hiss case exploded across the front pages of the nation’s newspapers on August 4,1948. The day before, Whittaker Chambers—a short, stocky man in a rumpled grey suit—had taken the stand before the House Un-American Activities Committee to...
Samuel Francis’s newest book, composed of 30 essays originally published in Chronicles between 1989 and 1996, is much more than a collection of articles about matters of passing concern. Rather it attests to Francis’s singular efforts in constructing a strategy by which Americans might recapture their nation from the decadent establishment now in power. He...
Maybe in another decade or so we will be ready to assess the full political and psychological impact of the 1995 bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City, but already we can observe some of the major effects. The partisan impact became clear last year, when Bill Clinton’s reelection owed so much to the...
“Glorious things are spoken of thee, O city of God.” —Psalms LXXXVII This rich and complex book is on one level the summing up of a controversy over a properly Christian, specifically Catholic, view of politics which has pitted the author, a theologian, against certain “neoconservative” thinkers, notably Richard Neuhaus, Michael...
What a marathon of Jefferson-bashing we have had in the last few years. This book by the “global statesman” O’Brien follows several other critical biographies, all of which have been highlighted in the fashionable reviews. More than usually offensive to Jefferson admirers were a collection (The View from Monticello) by University of Virginia professors trashing...
Gary David Comstock is Protestant chaplain and visiting assistant professor of sociology at Wesleyan University. The author cites his “lover/partner Ted” in the acknowledgments, and thus manifestly belongs to the group he describes in uniformly favorable terms. The book is interesting, and in many respects challenging to the traditionally minded reader. A jacket blurb by...
If you live long enough junk becomes antiques, and cast-offs are classics. It’s pleasant to think that the popular culture of only a few decades ago is now revered, but it’s also scary. A recent visit to a clothing store flashing lime-green and neon-yellow polyester revivals of the 70’s was enough to remind me that...
A poet’s critical prose holds interest for many people. Scholars examine it for clarifications or contradictions of the poet’s verse, admiring readers for echoes of the language that captivated them in the poetry, to which students and new readers may want some kind of “authorized introduction.” When writing about the work of others poets reveal...
“Could Shakespeare give a theory of Shakespeare?” —R.W. Emerson Story-telling is a feature of all societies. If the world is to make sense, if we are to live together in families, cities, nations, if we are to do our daily work, if life is to be livable at all, we must tell...
“Look, men, there is Jackson standing like a stone wall! Let us determine to die here, and we will conquer! Follow me!” —General Bernard E. Bee, C.F.A., shortly before falling, mortally wounded, in First Manassas The era of the War for Southern Independence illuminates the present time for what it is,...
Tactical strengths and strategic weaknesses mark John D. McKenzie’s reassessment of Robert E. Lee’s generalship. The strengths of this book are many. The weaknesses, however, undercut the very point that the author attempts to make; namely, that Lee was at best an average military leader, and that Lee’s apologists have given us a biased view...
Philip Jenkins’ book is a gold mine of information on pro-fascist and pro- Nazi groups in Pennsylvania during the 1930’s. Jenkins makes informative distinctions among the various bearers of Camicie fasciste, differentiating silver, khaki, black, and brown shirts and explaining the significance of each. He is also careful not to exaggerate the importance of any...
In his new novel Wendell Berry returns to the time and the characters found in his earlier and more complex work, A Place on Earth. The atmosphere is familiar: a community subtly unsettled by the distant events of World War II; families still rooted in place through bonds to the land and to each other;...
No one can deny the decline of civility and manners, both a cause and effect of our decadent society. Digby Anderson and the British-based Social Affairs Unit have explored this trend, and the quickening downward spiral toward barbarism so evident in the Western world. Gentility Recalled is a defense of the old-fashioned concept of “manners”...
In his journal, the psychologist William James records that he once met Sir James Frazer, whose Golden Bough had been among the first Western books to attempt to record systematically the beliefs of traditional peoples around the world. James, then undertaking ambitious projects of his own, asked Frazer whether he had ever met any of...
Laurence Lieberman’s two dozen essays on contemporary American poets—some (Robert Lowell, Robert Penn Warren) well known, others (Mark Strand, Frederick Morgan) not—are written in the self-expressive and dithyrambic mode of D.H. Lawrence and James Dickey. Lieberman wants literary criticism to be “personal and instinctively charged,” to carry an “electric pulse that is nakedly alive.” He...
So there is a new Fowler, or rather a Burchfield. It joins the list of beloved reference works corrupted or destroyed to placate our ignorance and our political sensibilities. Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable had many of its supposedly dated items excised to make room for television trivia. The Encyclopedia Britannica traded the wit...
Surveying the clergy sex scandals of the past decade, one is reminded of Christ’s prediction that “from him who does not have, even that which he seems to have shall be taken away” (Matthew 25:29). The rather prurient glee with which the media have covered these cases—primarily those involving Roman Catholic priests—highlights as it exacerbates...
The global industrial revolution being engineered by multinational firms and the dismantling of international trade barriers have produced wrenching social changes and will unleash more. Rolling Stone National Editor William Greider, author of Secrets of the Temple (on the Federal Reserve) and Who Will Tell the People (on contemporary politics), here surveys global capitalism and...
“If the general government should persist in the measures now threatened, there must be war. It is painful to discover with what unconcern they speak of war, and threaten it. They seem not to know what its horrors are.” —Stonewall Jackson On balance, Jeffrey Rogers Hummel has written a provocative and much-needed book on what...
The rise to political prominence of former Airborne Forces General Aleksandr Lebed, and especially his emphasis on law and order as the only real basis for proceeding with reforms, has raised the specter in the Russian mind of the proverbial Man on a White Horse, the military savior whose iron-fisted rule puts the national house...
According to Harvard professor James Medoff and financial analyst Andrew Harless, one of the most baleful influences on America’s economic health—and a reason for the declining standard of living of both blue- and white-collar workers—is the moneylending sector, which includes many commercial and investment banks and individual investors. In the authors’ view, the lenders have...
Dr. Germana Paraboschi’s Leo Strauss e la destra americana (Leo Strauss and the American Right) is one of the few serious studies of the American right to come out of Italy. Dr. Paraboschi is a young scholar, born in Milan in 1961 and now living just outside Pavia. She spent several years in the United...
“The New Englandeis are a people of God, settled in those which were once the Devil’s territories.” —Cotton Mather S.T. Joshi begins his mammoth biographical study of Howard Phillips Lovecraft by quoting his subject’s reaction to a suggestion from a fan that he write his autobiography. With the almost pathological modesty...
Saint Ambrose, the reputed author of the Athanasian Creed, did not move his lips when he read. Neither did Ambrose’s pupil and colleague Saint Augustine. The Roman chroniclers who witnessed this feat thought it only a curiosity, and the provincial missionaries’ example took generations to become the ruling style of reading in the West. Regardless...
Gary Snyder’s new books A Place in Space, a collection of essays and talks, and Mountains and Rivers Without End, a cycle of poems, are of a piece. Both summarize more than 40 years of writing on literary, environmental, and social concerns. Both speak to causes that Snyder—in the familiar personae of walker and hitchhiker,...
David Cooper has written a first-rate introduction to the life and thought of Martin Heidegger. Despite the brevity of his work, Cooper has packed into it a biographical sketch of Heidegger, a discussion of Being and Time (1927) and of Heidegger’s other interwar and postwar writings, an appraisal of interpretive literature dealing with his subject’s...
Forty years ago in Commentary, Ruth Gay created the American Jewish essay as an art form of dignity and eloquence, and in this wonderful book she brings her life’s work to its glorious climax in a sustained statement of remarkable purity. In the beginning, she took the raw materials of everyday life as lived by...
The manipulative sensationalism regarding any display of the Confederate battle flag continues unabated. The New York Times gets hot and bothered, or sexually aroused—or whatever it is that the New York Times becomes—whenever that banner appears over the capitol of South Carolina or on a vanity tag in Maryland, indeed anywhere. The shibboleths of liberalism...
Desmond Dupre (for many years the lutanist of the Deller Consort) used to say that the lute was to the 17th century what the harpsichord was to the 18th century, the spinet to the 19th, and the gramophone to our own age. Americans listen to music (or the synthetic equivalent) all day long, but few...
For better or worse, British religious writer Karen Armstrong is rapidly becoming a publishing phenomenon. Partly because of the demographics of an aging baby boom, religious books are becoming a very hot item on the best-seller charts, ranging from reports of cuddly angels who allegedly guard our steps, through the pour épater les bourgeois efforts...
“Ambition and suspicion always go together.” —G.C. Lichtenberg Back in the 1950’s and 60’s, when Malcolm Muggeridge was one of the resident personalities of British television, all over Britain people used to wonder what the origins of such a bizarre figure might be. Many of them would watch solely to be...
Wallace Stegner’s death on April 13, 1993, was not, as the cliche has it, untimely. He had lived to the respectable age of 85, after all; had lived to see the wide-open West of his early years carved by bulldozers, devoured by cities, and filled with people. Untimely, no; but perhaps ironic, for Stegner died...
“Do not the seas and the mountains and the prairies and the plains in some manner and to some extent transform men into their own likeness?” —Cyrenus Cole The America First cause of 1959-41 finds a powerful, if unusual and indirect, affirmation in E. Bradford Burns’ Kinship with the Land: Regionalist...
Dr. Bernard Nathanson has written an important book that in time will rank with Merton’s Seven Storey Mountain and Malcolm Muggeridge’s Chronicles of Wasted Time as books which our descendants, familial and spiritual, will examine closely in the 21st and 22nd centuries in order to understand both man’s inhumanity to humanity and to his personal...
What a peculiar, in some respects downright weird little world this fascinating biography introduces us to. Imagine a very clever, very plain, very spoiled little boy, born at the turn of the century into the intensely competitive upper-middle or lower-aristocratic class in Britain. Conventional success at sports, diplomacy, the professions, or business being ruled out...
“Where law ends, tyranny begins.” —William Pitt On the eve of the inauguration of the second Clinton administration, reading biographies of the First Couple is like reading Airport while waiting to board a transcontinental flight. A morbid interest in gruesome facts and events is further titillated by the anticipation of horrors...
The tragic fate of the Cherokee tribe is well documented. What is less widely known, and probably less researched, is the fairly rapid destruction of the Creeks—a nation whose territory included most of what is today Alabama and southern Georgia—and the role played by Andrew Jackson in their demise. In a style more readable than...
“Madly for Adlai,” proclaimed the campaign buttons in 1952. But Adlai Ewing Stevenson II wasn’t the kind of politician who aroused mad affections, or, for that matter, hostilities. He was a Stevenson. Passion isn’t the Stevenson thing; service is—service conducted with objectivity and a certain fidelity to the public weal. Jean Baker, professor of history...
Georgie Anne Geyer is no stranger to the immigration issue. For years her syndicated columns have included spirited criticism of efforts toward the redefinition of American identity. They have attacked what Geyer calls the “citizenship mill,” the thoughtless naturalization of masses of Third World residents (not all of them legally in the United States), bilingual...
In The End of Science, John Horgan, a staff reporter for Scientific American, writes about his encounters with both scientists and philosophers of science and concludes that modern science is coming to an end. In every significant field of scientific research, from neuroscience to cosmology, theory has reached so great an impasse that new breakthroughs...
The criminal trial of the former football great O.J. Simpson on the charge of murder, a trial that overshadows the Gulf War as the media event of the 1990’s, has been over for more than a year. The civil trial against him, charging that he violated the civil rights of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron...