Category: Reviews

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...

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...

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...

“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...

The nearly lifelong friendship of Henry Adams and Henry James, both now accepted as writers of towening stature, was one of the most engaging yet contrary relationships in our literary history. And to experience it—in the correspondence that George Monteiro has now splendidly edited—is to come to know what Adams called the “type bourgeois-bostonien.” In...

From its beginnings, science fiction (bastard offspring of fantasy) has exerted a vulgar appeal. Some of its proponents have never shied away from this and, if anything, have celebrated the intelligent child’s outlook, as witness the career of Ray Bradbury. The majority of science-fiction writers have grown into an awkward adolescence in which conquering the...

Freudian Fraud has an intriguing but difficult-to-prove thesis, namely that Freudian thought radically altered American society for the worse. An “audit of Freud’s American account,” says Torrey, shows more debits than credits. He believes the chief liability inherent in the Freudian system is its tendency to undermine traditional notions of responsibility. “Don’t blame me, blame...

“Fox populi.” —Anonymous No public figure in American history is more inscrutable than Abraham Lincoln. While this is in some measure due to his extraordinary deftness as a politician, it is primarily the result of his astounding success in refounding the Republic in his own image. So thoroughly did Lincoln reform our collective historical and...

“Every kind of writing is good save that which bores.” —Voltaire The Pacific Northwest of the United States, embracing Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and western Montana, has long been a major source of agricultural and mineral wealth. For generations it has also served as a center for the fine arts, but only recently has it done...

I had heard about, but not read, “The End of History?” Francis Fukuyama’s star-burst essay published in 1989; but I felt a twinge of sympathy for him as his critics chortled and pointed at history rumbling anew: people dancing atop the Berlin Wall, the Soviet Union falling to pieces, an American Army flying into Arabia....

In May 1991, Risa Kugal, a fortyish New York woman who said she was unemployed and supported by her mother, appeared at court in Brooklyn. She was there, as James Grant tells us, to have $75,000 in credit card debt wiped off the books under Chapter Seven of the federal bankruptcy code. She owed $18,000...

“I never had the opportunity of searching out God. He sought me out. He stalked me like a redskin, took careful aim and fired.” —C.S. Lewis The disgruntled professor who equates academic integrity with paucity of book sales and who is thereby convinced that the masses who follow the writings of C.S. Lewis must be...

Since Professor Wills has a way of relating episodes that transforms the dramatic into the soporific and turns the concrete into the abstract, this first biography of Forrest to be written since 1944 is probably the last that anyone should read. An unrelenting tendentiousness warps his interpretation of even the most transparent matters, so that...

The terms “global economy” and “New World Order” have become part of the common litany that frames foreign policy discussions. Though the second term is often used in a mocking or ironic tone, the first has attained the status of a paradigm. Yet Hazel J. Johnson, a professor of finance at the University of Louisville,...

At the age of 83, Wallace Stegner is the éminence grise of Western American literature, a man responsible for shaping the writing not only of the region but also that of points eastward, thanks to the scores of graduates from the Stanford writing program that bears his name. Stegner’s work, regrettably, sells far less than...

“Democracy is Lovelace and the people is Clarissa.” —John Adams I was born in 1946, right in the middle of Harry Truman’s accidental and tumultuous first term as President. I have no memory of the man until one early November morning in 1952, when my mother and grandmother were discussing the election of Dwight Eisenhower....

Gerald N. Rosenberg, an assistant professor of political science and an instructor in law at the University of Chicago, has some simple advice for activists who think a United States Supreme Court ruling is an end-all: not only are you wrong, but your money is better spent out of court than in court. In The...

“I am against the prophets, saith the Lord, that steal my words every one from his neighbour.” —Jeremiah 23:30 After seven years on public and private payrolls as senior editor of the King Papers Project, Clayborne Carson has finally produced the first volume of MLK’s papers. The project began in 1984, and since 1986 has...

This beautiful little book—one that does much credit to its publisher— appears as a blessing amid the clutter and noise and ugliness that characterize the publishing industry as well as literary discourse today. A pleasure to hold and to behold, this volume is also the vehicle for rendering words, thoughts, and values that seem new...

For us to love our country, Burke somewhere wrote, our country must be beautiful. The sheer aesthetic ugliness of modern capitalistic civilization has been as much a reason for the revulsion against it on the part of poets, artists, and social critics as have its various injustices and inequities, real or alleged. We are inclined...

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once mentioned the self-punishing limitations of his projected but never written autobiography: “I cannot write my biography on a higher plane than I exist on. And by the very fact of writing it I do not necessarily enhance myself; I may therefore even make myself dirtier than I was in the...

Richard Posner has a complaint against many of his fellow judges. Owing to their lack of up-to-date information and their conservative backgrounds, his colleagues often decide cases that touch on sex in an ignorant and benighted manner. Judge Posner aims to remedy matters with this comprehensive treatise, which offers both a theory of how sexual...

A few months ago I went out into the Arizona desert to take photographs for a book of natural history I am writing. I had with me an expensive, late-model Japanese camera that might be advertised as “idiot-proof,” had the manufacturer been less guarded in the tone of its publicity. In fact, the camera turned...

“Has anyone ever seen a clean cow?” —Anonymous It’s hard to know where to begin to respond to Jeremy Rifkin’s apocalyptic new book, Beyond Beef. You could start with Chesterton’s famous remark on “believing anything,” or some of the paleoconservative ruminations on “Gnosticism.” Perhaps in a time when Oliver Stone’s paranoid (and lucrative) fantasies pass...

“In fourteen-hundred and ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean nude.” —Chronicles, 1992 The profusion of the anti-Western virus released by the quincentenary of Columbus’ landfall on the Caribbean island of San Salvador has become the mental equivalent of the AIDS epidemic, fatally infecting millions of promiscuous and incautious intellectuals and subintellectuals. For the literary ghetto, Kirkpatrick...

It is common in liberal and neoconservative circles to argue that the United States should foster democracy around the world to enhance its own security because “democracies don’t fight each other.” At the same time, more traditional conservative critics call for a return to classical republicanism, which they believe will produce, among other things, peace...

John Lukacs has observed that our century’s two most significant revolutionaries were Lenin and Wilson. Of the two, according to Lukacs, the internationalist Lenin had less destructive influence in the long run than the democratic moralist but fervent nationalist Wilson; today it may be said that the Wilsonians have outlasted the Commies. Democracy and national...

In the early 50’s, Philip Graham of the Washington Post tried to hire James  Reston away from the New York Times at twice the coins the Sulzbergers were dispensing. Thanks, but no thanks, Reston said-and kept saying whenever his friend Graham sought to renew the discussion. The Times family was James Reston’s family, professionally speaking....

“In large states public education will always be mediocre, for the same reason that in large kitchens the cooking is usually bad.”  —F.W. Nietzsche After a decade of “reform,” the public schools are at best stagnant. The College Board reports that SAT scores for college-hound 12th-graders have dropped for the fourth consecutive year, with the...

Larry Woiwode, the North Dakota novelist (I do not mean that in a diminishing way), has described his fiction as “a continuing spiritual exercise that any reader may join in on.” His fifth novel, Indian Affairs, is a fitfully satisfying workout.  Indian Affairs reintroduces us to Chris Van Eananam, a graduate student, and his wife Ellen;...

Cormac McCarthy is so fine a writer-for my money the best novelist in America today-that he and his work must be accepted pretty much on their own terms. Criticism therefore, in the case of Mr. McCarthy, is reducible largely to questions of taste. He has published now six novels, all of them distinguished for reality...

If you’re white in the United States, you, says Professor Andrew Hacker, have at least that much going for you. “No matter how degraded their lives, white people are still allowed to believe that they possess the blood, the genes, the patrimony of superiority,” Hacker, a political scientist, writes of white Americans. “No matter what happens, they...

“A republic, if you can keep it.” —Benjamin Franklin More often than not, historians of antebellum American politics lose their perspective, and perhaps their good sense, when they encounter John C. Calhoun. The other great men in the political history of the United States during that era-John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson, Daniel Webster and Henry...

Like Richard A. Epstein’s earlier book Takings, dealing with the defense of property in the Fifth Amendment, his latest one combines legal study and economic analysis with megadoses of political and social theory. Though Epstein explores, for the most part, civil rights legislation aimed at the removal of job discrimination, he devotes the opening section...

The old man has done a bit of everything that a journalist can do. He has been an opera critic, a war correspondent, a sportswriter. He prides himself most on the years he spent covering the bullfights of his native Sevilla. For some time now he has been mumbling to his American visitor, Bruce Schoenfeld,...

From the time of their discovery in 1947, the “scrolls from the Dead Sea” have been a source of fascination, speculation, consternation, confusion, and, in the view of these two authors, a far-reaching religious conspiracy. Deception reads like a thriller, or the best of the many books on the assassination of President Kennedy. It is...

“A Conservative is only a Tory who is ashamed of himself.” —J. Hookham Frere On page 62 of this book, the author recalls with irritation having once been accused by Murray Kempton of dishonoring the “legacy” of His Master’s Voice, H. L. Mencken, by “conformism.” How, Tyrrell demanded incredulously, was it possible for him to...

Florence’s La Nazione, a sober conservative daily with a national circulation and founded at the time of the American Civil War, stated on November 2, 1991, that more than 10 percent of Italians today are fully occupied in “organized crime” (not counting politicians and the legal profession). “Organized crime,” in Italy, doesn’t mean independent “self-employed”...

While M. Revel’s critique of Western leftists and fellow travelers is fully shared by me, I part company with him when it comes to the issue of the durability of communist systems. Both he and I were among the vast number of observers and critics of such regimes who did not anticipate their spectacular and...

The wide-eyed declamations of Shirley MacLaine to the contrary, there is nothing particularly new about the so-called New Age, that hodgepodge of religious borrowings from diverse sources ranging from the genuine (Buddhism, cybernetics) to the quackish (L. Ron Hubbard, Ignatius Donnelly). What is new—and surprising, in a creepy sort of way—is the number of Americans...

“Too much liberty leads both men and nations to slavery.” —Cicero In a recent and provocative essay, Paul Gottfried described Eugene D. Genovese as a “hero of paleoconservative intellectuals.” No doubt this declaration qualified as news in some circles, for the distinguished historian of the American South has always worked within the Marxist tradition. Or...