Category: Reviews

“When tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness, its logical outcome is terror. It ends in forced labor camps and in the fumes of the gas chamber.” —Flannery O’Connor In response to the charge of obsession with a “single issue,” pro-life activists contend that the abortion debate is really paradigmatic. As Joseph Sobran suggested...

The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind is that, as Mark Noll puts it, “there is not much of an evangelical mind”; that, despite all their other virtues, “American evangelicals are not exemplary for their thinking, and they have not been for several generations”; and that, at a popular level, “modern American evangelicals have failed notably...

“I would rather that the people should wonder why I wasn’t President than why I am.” —Salmon P. Chase Contra Ecclesiastes, the American presidency was something new under the sun. With no explicit precedents to guide them, the Founding Fathers constructed the office and defined its parameters by analogy. In his richly detailed, elegantly written,...

A wit and a fussbudget as well as a scholar, Paul Fussell is one of the best essayists and observers around. For personal as well as literary reasons, there is no one better qualified to undertake a study of the writings of Sir Kingsley Amis. They make a natural pair. Indeed, they have been friends...

It is fitting that two of these outstanding volumes of poetry (Taylor’s and Weider’s) gather work from over 20 years of the poets’ respective careers; fitting because all three collections exhibit a concern for the passage of time, both its destructive power and its capacity to inspire wisdom and love. In contrast to poets who...

Never did I appreciate so much the genius of the Founding Fathers as after finishing this remarkable biography of President Clinton. The authors of the Constitution created a government which makes it impossible for the United States to be transformed into a continental Dogpatch some millions of square miles in extent, which is precisely what...

“Nature knows no equality.” —Luc de Varvenargues For about four years before the publication of The Bell Curve last fall, occasional news reports dribbled out tidbits of information about the book and its coauthor. The stories were often pegged to Charles Murray’s departure from the neoconservative Manhattan Institute in 1990 because of the institute’s discomfort...

For connoisseurs of biography, Robert Skidelsky’s projected three-volume work, John Maynard Keynes, will rank with the best of the genre. The first volume appeared over a decade ago under the subtitle Hopes Betrayed. The second volume, under review here, surpasses the first. The third is not yet finished. Like its predecessor, volume two is a...

“Every good poet includes a critic, but the reverse will not hold.” —William Shenstone In the popular memory the interwar years in Western Europe were a period of instability, inertia, and poverty or, as Auden described the 1930’s, “a low dishonest decade.” One seldom hears about the interesting fact that during those interwar years, in...

Is the current wave of immigration to America, mainly from the Third World, an invasion? Wayne Lutton and John Tanton maintain that it is. The authors effectively argue that our unprecedented level of immigration, forced on the country by selfish interests, is remaking America in many negative ways, especially by eroding our national culture. But...

Despite its optimistic title, Recovering American Literature is really about the severity of illness, the magnitude of loss. In a book weighted with evidence, Peter Shaw shows literature has suffered by subverting art to politics. Substituting the dogma of political correctness for universal themes and metaphysical questions, academics since the 1960’s have been reinterpreting the...

Over the past two decades, Western Europe’s populist right has steadily consolidated its power. According to Professor Betz, the issue that galvanizes supporters of the populist parties is Third World immigration. Whether the right-wing parties will ever muster the popular support they need to win parliamentary majorities depends on how successfully the governments of Western...

Saul Bellow’s It All Adds Up is his first (and given his age probably his last) collection of nonfiction. Mr. Bellow is close to 80. His introduction suggests a mood of self-reformation, not solemn but tending toward testament. He is said to be at work on a novel. He has outlived most of his generation,...

“A conservative government is an organized hypocrisy.” —Benjamin Disraeli It may speak volumes about American conservatives that David Frum’s critique of “big government conservatism” permitted William Buckley—or so Buckley claims on the dust jacket—to enjoy “the most refreshing ideological experience in a generation.” To a conservative movement led by advocates of national uplift allied with...

[The Rape of Europa: The Fate of Europe’s Treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War, by Lynn H. Nicholas (New York: Alfred A.Knopf) 498 pp., $27.50] Lynn Nicholas has written the most comprehensive account of the Nazis’ attempt to steal, sell, dismantle, and destroy Europe’s artistic heritage, but her stunning illustrations nearly...

Sometimes you wonder. Having been told by a Democrat that if we had “screwed up” at Saratoga we would today have national health insurance, I suppressed a number of reactions that came to mind by deciding to start smoking again. One was to suggest that if anyone needed health insurance, it could easily be obtained....

If California were to secede from the United States and establish itself, as its first Anglo settlers once intended, as an independent republic, it would instantly emerge as one of the world’s richest nations. As it is, one in every ten Americans now resides in the so-called Golden State. Its economy affects not only those...

It was an editor’s dream: poems of this caliber, unsolicited and unexpected, in my post office box. The verse was assertive, muscular, practiced but never unsurprising. Who was this man? Everyone else knew, it seemed. Richard Moore’s poems and essays had been widely published for more than 15 years before the publication of his first...

“There is no more self-assured man than a had poet.” —Martial Sometimes it seems as though everyone who was anyone in postwar American poetry was attending, teaching at, or at least near Harvard in the 1950’s. This impression is confirmed by Peter Davison’s memoir: everyone was. In The Fading Smile, Davison offers glimpses into this...

America’s British Culture by the late Russell Kirk offers a clear, insightful explication of key British elements in American culture, as well as an important critique of the current cultural climate in America. Kirk examines four major British contributions that have particularly shaped American culture: language and a common body of literature; rule of law...

“The difficulty in life is the choice.” —George Moore Please excuse the personal anecdotes scattered throughout this essay. As a woman, I found it difficult to write a standard third-person review and instead drew on my own experiences and emotions in responding to this book. Rejecting rationality, logic, and “vertical” thinking, I recognized that my...

So many things have been said in praise of McCarthy’s work that it is hard not to sound like an echo. Inevitably, the reviewer notes the energy and grace of his style, and there is no gainsaying that. The relentless power of his sentences and the tautness of the action can leave a reader emotionally...

For starters, I propose to say the unthinkable: the unnamed coauthors with Bob Woodward of this book are President and Mrs. Clinton. All the inside stories dealing with the first 18 months of the Clinton administration, the reported dialogue, who said what to whom, and the secret memoranda were, I believe, handed to Mr. Woodward...

Written documents should be interpreted with an eye toward discerning the intent of the author. When the Constitution of the United States is the text under consideration, the relevant intentions are those of the men who drafted and ratified the document. This proposition reflects a long-established canon of construction: common-law judges as far back as...

Faithful Roman Catholics are routinely criticized (this book is no exception) for their unwillingness to condone the use of contraception. Although it is commonly believed that opposition to contraception is unique to Catholic doctrine, it was only recently that Protestants gave up the same fight. As recently as the 40’s and 50’s, the Anglican C.S....

In 1944, a party of German prisoners-of-war escaped from a camp in Phoenix, armed with old maps and with the intention of stealing a boat and sailing to Mexico. When they saw the “pitiful trickle” that is the modern Gila, they began to hike downstream in despair and were soon rounded up. Their leader later...

“Wisdom is neither inheritance nor legacy.” —Thomas Fuller In his keynote speech to a meeting of the John Randolph Club, Murray N. Rothbard exhorted his colleagues to take up the task he sees as central to the success of their movement: nothing less than the repeal of the 20th century. The publication of a new...

This book is either irrefutable evidence against a multicultural society or the last-ditch plea of someone who is very concerned with the problems posed by multiculturalism but: who wants to make a go of it nevertheless. It may well be both. Lani Guinier’s essays ask how far democracy must go to accommodate itself to groups...

In his engaging biography of John C. Calhoun, Irving H. Bartlett reminds us that American political culture and the men who made it were not always as decadent and corrupt as they are today. Yet Bartlett’s book is not a partisan manifesto. He is respectful of Calhoun but not always sympathetic to his views, aspirations,...

The two books reviewed here provide a contrast both in style and in substance. Whereas Thomas Molnar treats Utopians and historical optimists with exuberant contempt, Michael Ignatieff bewails the fact that nations and nationalism have not yet disappeared. Molnar is proud of his relentless realism, in which politics are related to man’s fallen state; Ignatieff,...

“The Gaseous Verterbrata who own, operate and afflict the universe have treated me with excessive politeness, and when I mount the gallows at last I may well say with the Psalmist (putting it, of course, into the prudent past tense): The lines have fallen unto me in pleasant places.” —H.L. Mencken In the past 23...

The history of the British novel is a great topic that must periodically be reconsidered, particularly now when we are so much more sophisticated than those provincials who wrote the novels as well as those belletrists whose accounts of those novels have become hopelessly passé. Looking back, we have to smile at Edward Wagenknecht’s Cavalcade...

Henry Luce both created and dominated a new form of national journalism between 1930 and 1960. Founder and editor-in-chief of Time, Life, and Fortune, he is best remembered for his 1941 Life essay “The American Century,” a robust call for the United States to assume world power status. Robert Herzstein, Carolina Research Professor of History...

America, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner had it, is a land defined by its frontiers, once inexorably westward- lending, led by Manifest Destiny. The cultural geographer Carl Ortwin Sauer gave Turner’s “frontier thesis” a twist that denizens of the New West will appreciate: “The westward movement in American history,” he wrote, “gave rise to the...

“Populist” is a term so fraught with distortion and so apt to raise misleading connotations that we probably should find another word to use. It is worse in this respect than even “Whig” or “liberal.” Taken precisely, it refers to a political movement that swept some agricultural regions of the further Midwest and South in...

It now appears that the safest way for scholars to treat Abraham Lincoln is in discrete segments of his life, leaving it to other, perhaps braver, souls to draw the appropriate conclusions. This means that, as in this book which focuses on the presidential years, modern Lincoln scholarship seems to miss the essence of the...

Exploration of the relationship between Jews and America is far from complete, at least among Jewish conservatives, who do not rely on their religious traditions as explicitly as do some among the Christian right. There has been some speculation in Jewish circles that the reason Jews in America have prospered is because both Judaism and...

The products of mass culture are not automatically to be sneered at, first because of their massive presence and second because sometimes they have a certain merit or are somehow amusing. The Creature From the Black Lagoon movies are still symbolically potent, and McDonald’s has been known to dispense the best coffee that is easily...

Andrew Lytle, in his family memoir A Wake for the Living, compares the past to a foreign country. “If we dismiss the past as dead,” he writes, “and not as a country of the living which our eyes are unable to see, as we cannot see a foreign country but know it is there, then...

“A politician . . . one that would circumvent God.” —William Shakespeare In preparing my review of this riveting biography, I gathered samples of what has recently been written about Richard M. Nixon, and I must say they make a bewildering collection. Here are a few: “A monster of a million disguises.” Andrew Kopkind, the...

As traditional as a Chinese restaurant, as homegrown as a Subaru, as agrarian as a fax machine, as Celtic as a computer, as handcrafted as cable television, as hospitable as an eight-lane expressway, as Baptist as a drug deal, as Presbyterian as neo-pagan worship, as Episcopalian as a lesbian sermonette, and as pious as an...

“Prejudice renders a man’s virtue his habit: and not a series of disconnected acts. Through just prejudice, his duty becomes a part of his nature.” —Edmund Burke Few names are more notorious in the contemporary academic and culture wars than that of Stanley Fish. Among conservatives, he is mockingly dismissed as the representative of all...

Many black Americans are convinced that they are the targets of a vast array of white-authored schemes designed to spike their food with contraceptives; force them to engage in self-destructive behavior, especially drug addiction; and kill them, to use their bodies for medical experiments or out of simple malice. In her new book I Heard...

“The wars of peoples will be more X terrible than the wars of kings!” So predicted the young Winston Churchill as the new century dawned in 1901. The world wars (two hot, one cold) that have marked the decades since have validated Churchill while contradicting the glib predictions that “global democracy” would bring a new...

John Gray’s latest book, an anthology of essays, confronts unflinchingly the state of conservatism in the Anglo-American world. Resistant to the happy talk about a conservative renaissance in the 80’s, Gray, a Whiggish Oxford don and a scholar of classical liberalism, stresses the ineffectiveness of the respectable right in both the United States and his...

“Blood and revenge are hammering in my head.” —William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus In his 1990 pamphlet “How to Revitalize Russia,” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote, “When our fathers and grandfathers threw down their weapons during a deadly war [World War I], deserting the front in order to plunder their neighbor at home, they in effect made a...

The disappointing qualities of this final volume of Edmund Wilson’s diaries, due partially to surfeit (over 2,000 pages of The Twenties, The Thirties, The Forties, and The Fifties precede these almost 1,000), have finally to do with the limitations of the modern secular intellectual mind as it wrestles with the perceived insufficiency, tawdriness, and dishonesty...

William Pfaff, syndicated political columnist for the International Herald Tribune (Paris), is probably the most perceptive writer in the world today on European affairs, particularly as they affect and are affected by American policy. He is not as much of a political philosopher as some others, like Jacques Ellul and the late Bertrand de Jouvenel,...