“One bates an author that’s all author.” —Lord Byron The line between the Old America and the New is closer than most of us think. A single generation separates not only the Western pioneer from the St. Louis suburbanite, it separates the New Woman from the Old. Rose Wilder Lane, child of westering parents, was...
In an essay on Nietzsche written in 1947, Thomas Mann spoke of “the fascist epoch of the West” in which “we are living and, despite the military victory over fascism, shall continue to live for a long time.” Gene Edward Veith, Jr., dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Concordia University of Wisconsin...
P.D. James has attracted notice for how well she is able, within the confines of her mystery novels, to write about contemporary British society. Reviewing Devices and Desires in the New York Review of Books some time ago, Hilary Mantel made the suggestion that it was perhaps time for James to “slide out of her...
“Education is the process of driving a set of prejudices down your throat.” —Martin H. Fischer In March 1989, four young men in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, lured a retarded 17-year-old girl into a basement playroom, where they proceeded to rape her, penetrate her with a baseball bat and a broom handle, and generally brutalize...
In December 1982, Dr. Jack Yoffa of Syracuse, New York, took Zomax, a painkiller, just before driving to the hospital for minor surgery. About halfway there, Yoffa began to itch and turn red. Within 60 seconds, he was unconscious. His car hit a guardrail, crossed a three-lane highway (narrowly missing several cars), knocked over a...
When a civilization nearly two millennia in the building comes to an end, common decency requires that the world take note of its passing. For if ordinary people, born only to die in much less than a century, deserve a proper burial, what obsequies arc owing to a way of forming society and living life...
This volume of short stories seems to me to represent, as a book, two distinct levels of meaning. The first and most insistent of these levels is of course as a diverse gathering of brilliant fictions, each one a self-justifying experience. The variety of voices and subjects is itself refreshing and rewarding; the high standard...
“A conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who, however, has never learned to walk.” —Franklin D. Roosevelt This is a very disturbing book, concluding that “America will one day be ‘one with Nineveh and Tyre,'” and that the general principles of conservatism will only reappear “when circumstances favorable to civilization return.” The...
Poetry, short story, novel, drama, screenplay, criticism, the teaching of writing: George Garrett has excelled across the entire spectrum of literary art. I can call to mind no other contemporary American writer who approaches this feat, though perhaps Garrett’s friend Fred Chappell comes closest. But, what is even rarer for a first-rank artist, Garrett also...
Though Thomas Knock draws no explicit comparisons between Woodrow Wilson’s plans for a post- Great War world and the policies George Bush tried to fashion for a post-Cold War world, his use of the term “New World Order” in the title of his book is clearly meant to steer the reader to think in parallel...
Gerald Vizenor intends in his fictions to pay due homage to Coyote, the American Indian trickster figure, through twist-and-turn narrative high jinks. He has often been successful, notably in the rollicking novel Griever: An American Monkey King in China, a comic masterwork in which a visiting Native American scholar sets a nation of a billion...
“All the great things have been done by little nations.” —Benjamin Disraeli There is definitely less to Paul Kennedy’s new book than might appear on the surface of it. Preparing For the Twenty-First Century is an odd combination of old-fashioned doomsday alarmism, the modern lust for total planning, and the equally contemporary demand for a...
“Jesus Christ the same yesterday, today, and forever.” —Hebrews 13:8 I have never heard of a book about “the historical Moses,” and while philosophers study the thought of Sophocles and Plato, few bother to tell us what the historical Sophocles really said, as distinct from what Plato says he said. Muslims know the historical Mohammed...
The stores are still vending the recordings of Vladimir Horowitz, the imposing pianist whose career is now as lucrative as it was during his lifetime. Nearly all of his work is out on compact disc, from sources dating back to the 1920’s. Merit and celebrity coincide in this case, as they sometimes do—and when they...
For about 30 years Wendell Berry has been writing fiction, poetry, and essays motivated by what he identifies as “a desire to make myself responsibly at home in this world and in my native and chosen place.” I think the “world” he has in mind is that of mortality in general and of our chaotic...
One of the unfortunate after-effects of the so-called “Red Scare” of the early 50’s was the triumph of the “no limits” interpretation of the First Amendment, which has poisoned American political thought ever since. It goes something like this: the McCarthyite “reign of terror” permanently discredited the idea that you can suppress speech in a...
“One would suffer a great deal to he happy.” —Marly Wortley Montagu To be really successful a modern writer must reach and hold a huge audience, and there seems to be essentially two ways of doing it: the journeyman (or tradesman-like) and the heroic-histrionic. Scott, Trollope, Agatha Christie, and P.G. Wodehouse represent the first way,...
A reviewer of Jared Taylor’s impressive new book faces a dilemma. If a book’s principal thesis is valid, a critic must of course say so. But a difficulty arises in the present instance. According to Taylor, public orthodoxy inhibits discussion of race relations in our country. Dissenters from this orthodoxy face retribution. With remarkable courage,...
I might say at the onset that I am usually not a big fan of anthologies, though I have edited one; most end up unwieldy grab bags of vaguely related material. This is emphatically not the case with Gregory McNamee’s Named in Stone and Sky, a collection of Southwestern material that marvelously coheres into a...
Until recently, thinking and writing in dubious terms about immigration has been, well, something that polite and right-thinking folks just didn’t do. But now that taboo seems to be lifting, as evidenced by the recent publication of such books as George Kennan’s Around the Cragged Hill and Paul Kennedy’s Preparing for the Twenty-First Century: both...
“Dangers by being despised grow great.” —Edmund Burke Although preelection polls indicated that likely voters would favor candidates who supported immigration control, Bill Clinton, George Bush, and Ross Perot did not consider the issue worth mentioning during the recent presidential contest. But if our leaders wish the “i” word would go away, in the future...
“Good News.” -Title of a novel by Edward Abbey about the collapse of civilization in the American Southwest The chief victim to date in the so called Culture War is neither George Bush nor the Republican Party but “the Environment,” or what Christians used to call Creation. In the more than two decades since environmentalism...
Procrastinating readers can pat themselves on the back if they waited to pick up David Rieff’s Los Angeles: Capital of the Third World until it came out in paperback. For one thing, the Los Angeles riots, which so captivated television-transfixed Americans for a couple of days last year until the weekend arrived and the networks...
The Berkeley Roundtable on the International Economy (BRIE) has been in the forefront in devising the new paradigm of strategic trade and industrial policy. This set of essays by BRIE members articulates the group’s view of how the major national economies grow, innovate, and compete with one another and examines the various alternative world orders...
Folklore is not history, and mythmakers hate complications. Finally we have a reliable life of Boone through the considerable efforts of John Mack Faragher, a professor of history at Mount Holyoke College whose earlier book Women and Men on the Overland Trail (1979) won the American Historical Association’s prestigious Frederick Jackson Turner Award. Daniel Boone...
Hemingway continues to fascinate. The legendary life and heroic exploits of the man who was so admired, honored, and imitated are now wellknown: fisherman in the Michigan woods, reporter in Kansas City, wounded war hero, foreign correspondent from Constantinople to Cordoba, Left Bank drinker, bullfight aficionado, innovative stylist, African lion hunter, reporter in war-torn Spain,...
Southerners have a special feeling for the pathos of history. They know what it is like to have a lost cause, a history that might be gone with the wind but is still resonant and noble for all that. The Southern Confederacy’s almost-allies, the British, also have a sense of the pathos of history. But...
“A thousand years scarce serve to form a state; An hour may lay it in the dust.” —Lord Byron Few antiliberal writers are disliked and distrusted so much by mainstream “conservatives” as John Lukacs and George Kennan. Like most movements that achieve a degree of success, intellectual “conservatism” in America has petrified into an establishment...
“Mankind is tired of liberty.” —Benito Mussolini An acquaintance of mine, who is not particularly conservative, once heard a television newsman quack about how bad the 1950’s were. Disgusted, he burst out, “What was wrong with the 1950’s? People were norma/then!” People certainly seem a lot less “normal” nowadays. Charles J. Sykes has written a...
I suppose that after William Faulkner and Eudora Welty and Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy (1916-1990) has been for the last three decades the most widely read of Southern writers. He has been known as a social observer as well as a novelist, and as a philosopher as well as a Roman Catholic. And he has...
Many readers will fondly recall the earlier incarnation of Their Ancient Glittering Eyes (the title is taken from Yeats’s Lapis Lazuli), published in 1978 as Remembering Poets. That book contained Donald Hall’s reports of his close encounters with four giants of modernism—Robert Frost, Dylan Thomas, T.S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound. When Hall began revising for...
Hunter S. Thompson does not suffer fools gladly. For that matter, he seems to suffer no one at all, gladly or not. A survivor of the 1960’s, he has deemed his contemporaries “a whole subculture of frightened illiterates” and those younger than they “a generation of swine.” (And these are the people he professes to...
“Fame is like a river, that beareth up things light and swoln, and drowns things weighty and solid.” —Francis Bacon At the height of his career, William Gilmore Simms was ranked with the best writers produced by the United States. In the Northeast, his novels were considered inferior only to Cooper’s, and there were many...
The Critics Bear It Away is a collection of eight essays by Frederick Crews, dating “from the later 1980’s and early 1990’s,” starting off, after the accurate road map of the “Introduction,” with “The Sins of the Fathers Revisited,” an afterword written to accompany the 1989 reprinting of The Sins of the Fathers (1966), which...
Snaking out from the Middle Atlantic states is a long distinguished line of political and literary Copperheads: Millard Fillmore, Horatio Seymour, Harold Frederic, Edmund Wilson, and the Pennsylvania duo of James Buchanan and John Updike. These men were certainly not proslavery, but they did view the Union cause with rather more skepticism than did their...
“Our high respect for a well-read man is praise enough of literature.” —R.W. Emerson A critic who tries to stay abreast of the literature of his time, in any time, deserves respect as well as sympathy from less heroic readers content to pick and choose from among the deluge of titles that sends one literary...
Undoubtedly the greatest singer in the world in her time and since, Maria Callas (1923-1977) needs no introduction. What she does need is the highly intelligent and discriminating attention that Michael Scott has devoted to her. It is Mr. Scott who needs an introduction—to some at least, if not to everyone. Michael Scott will be...
Edgar Allan Poe was the finest American writer to be transformed into a “personality” in his own lifetime and, like François Villon, to be known less for his work than for his person. As is so often the case with figures of public celebrity, the facts of Poe’s life have been obscured by layers of...
“I ask myself again why anyone would find interest in the private dimensions of my own history,” muses Nobel laureate economist James M. Buchanan in his new collection of personal and intellectual autobiographical essays. The question, embedded in an essay entitled “Country Aesthetic,” which explores the manifold and profound meanings that the concept of country,...
Almost alone among the peoples of the world, the United States has largely been spared—at least until recently—the bitter conflicts that plague countries whose citizens do not share a common language. Since the early 17th century, immigrants from diverse backgrounds have settled here. In the past, it was understood that in exchange for enjoying opportunities...
“These monstrous views, . . . these venemous teachings.” —Pope Leo XIII on socialism According to the jacket copy of Doing Well and Doing Good, Richard John Neuhaus is “one of the most prominent religious intellectuals” of our time (which helps explain our time). Neuhaus argues that while “Christianity has had nothing to say” to...
One of the problems with treating an event like Watergate as history is that, for most of us, it isn’t. The “third-rate” burglary that became a constitutional crisis leading to the only resignation of a sitting President in our history may be two decades old, but it is still very much with us. In last...
“Disobedience in the eyes of any one who has read history is man’s original virtue. “ —Oscar Wilde The Republican Party Convention in Houston last summer verged on a gigantic symposium convened to discuss “The Religious Roots of the American Political System.” Conservatives—so the Republicans claim and their enemies charge—are inspired by religious convictions, which...
There are dangers in a daughter writing her father’s biography: the danger that she will be too uncritical if her relationship with him were close and affectionate; or, as is more common these days, that she will be too critical if it were not. Similarly, she may rely too much on her own reminiscences or...
Rivers exercise a strange pull on the human imagination; they work their way into every art form, from Bernini’s Renaissance sculptures of the great flows of Europe to Mikhail Sholokhov’s social-realist novels of Cossack life along the Don to Basho’s haiku celebrating the waterways of northern Japan. In this country no region has taken to...
The first thing I did when I became president of the Motion Picture Association of America was to junk the Hays Production Code.” Jack Valenti eliminated the Hays Production Code in 1966—when the average weekly motion-picture audience in the United States was 38 million people. The very next year, with the “moral strictures” of the...
“After all, money, as they say, is miraculous.” —Thomas Carlyle The economics profession, like many other branches of the social sciences, long ago had to decide whether to adopt positivist methods, as if its objects of study were organisms of constant and predictable motion, or to account for the infinite variety in human affairs by...
Richard Harding Davis exemplified the all-American ideal of Anglo-Saxon manhood—a chivalrous adventurer of spotless character and intentions, sporting, always in favor of the underdog, not too intellectual, and never without a clean starched shirt and a portable bathtub, no matter where his career as an intrepid reporter and war correspondent might take him. At the...
“My opinion with respect to immigration is that, except of useful mechanics and some particular descriptions of men or professions, there is no need of encouragement.” —George Washington In May 1991 rioting Central American immigrants looted and burned stores and destroyed police cars in Mount Pleasant, a declining, “multicultural” Washington neighborhood that overlooks the White...
I think it only right to declare my interest at the outset, for I have known Robert DeMaria for a quarter of a century as a friend and as a colleague at Dowling College. After all these years, I should have learned something from that experience, and just now three pieces of advice come to...