“It used to be one of our proudest boasts that we welcomed the downtrodden, the oppressed, the poverty-stricken, the fit and the unfit to a land of freedom, of plenty, of boundless opportunity. Our hindsight tells us that this boast was fatuous.” —George Horace Believe it or not, Chronicles was not the first magazine in...
“A well-written life is almost as rare as a well-spent one.” —Thomas Carlyle Even in these dreariest of days in academia, when American history has largely become a plaything for canting ideologues, the Old South continues to attract outstanding talent. Fine books and articles continue to appear, as Clyde Wilson’s Carolina Cavalier attests, notwithstanding the...
In 1858, as British and French forces pushed their way to Peking in the Opium Wars, Josiah Tatnall, commander of the neutral American naval squadron, intervened to save the British ships from Chinese guns and tow them safely out of range. When asked why he had abandoned his government’s official neutrality, Tatnall replied: “Blood is...
Disturbing the Nest is among the finest and most readable works of comparative sociology published in the last ten years, and the most effective critique of the Swedish welfare state now in print. David Poponoe’s careful, fully documented, and gently devastating portrait of modern Sweden surprises the reader, in part, because Poponoe is himself a...
Thomas Pynchon has been living out of the public eye for almost four decades now, a literary hermit who has succeeded by his very reclusiveness in attracting more attention than his less retiring colleagues. Seventeen years ago, his novel Gravity’s Rainbow elevated Pynchon to cult-hero status, and ever since his acolytes have eagerly awaited a...
It may be an embarrassing admission for somebody who has been a book review editor for the last 14 and a half years, but the truth is I had never heard of Tony Hillerman until May 1989, when I began traveling in the Southwest in connection with a book-writing project I am working on and...
Herbert von Karajan’s sixty years of conducting have left their mark not only in the memories of generations of concertgoers, but in the holdings of record collectors all over the world. In addition to being the “General Music-Director of Europe,” Karajan is by far the best-selling serious musician who has ever recorded. Now that his...
“Moderation lasts.” —Seneca The American public has fallen victim in recent years to a propaganda assault, launched and coordinated by the Israeli Likud party and their American partners, whose theme is clear and simple: the long-term security of the Jewish state lies in its ability to maintain control over the West Bank and the Gaza...
“With him the love of country means Blowing it all to smithereens And having it all made over new.” —Robert Frost Paul de Man’s life was “the classic immigrant story” (according to James Atlas). He arrived in New York in 1948 from his native Belgium and worked as a clerk at the Doubleday bookstore in...
“The great issues don’t need to be vulgarized,” observes the narrator of David Slavitt’s 15th work of fiction. “They are vulgar, for they are exactly those things that everybody worries about.” Of those great issues, perhaps the most inscrutable is the one most poignantly summarized in the title of Rabbi Harold Kushner’s 1982 bestseller, When...
My first reaction to reading this book is, what has all the controversy been about? Patterns is an empirical study of corporate giving to public interest—as opposed to traditional health and welfare—charities. Mr. Bennett has shown great ingenuity in constructing a paradigm of such giving that he does not claim to be formally representative, but...
“No changes have been made in the text of the book for this printing,” Robert Nisbet wrote in his preface to the 1970 edition of The Quest for Community. Nor have changes been made in the new ICS Press edition, though it does carry a 13-page foreward by William A. Schambra that attempts to locate...
“Truths would you teach, or save a sinking land? All fear, none aid you, and few understand.” —Alexander Pope Poet, critic, and teacher Marion Montgomery is known to have taken a fortnight’s break from a book project in order to write another book! Ever since coming out a few years ago with the Prophetic Poet...
The state of higher education in our country is best passed over in silence, in order to avoid both useless exasperation and any provocation of “reform.” The mess we are in is the result of a parade of fraudulent reforms and movements, of a national, political, and social corruption so pervasive that I see no...
When Charles Causley’s Collected Poems was published in 1975, reviewers in American magazines generally praised his work but somehow managed to relegate him to the limbo of minor poets. By focusing on his mastery of the ballad, they may have given the impression of a Johnny One-Note who, in his idiosyncratic disregard for the main...
Ever since the Sony story, in the form of Akio Morita’s Made in Japan, won a nitch on the best-seller lists, Japanese executives have been turning out memoirs on business success for American audiences. Sadehei Kusumoto’s biography, written with the help of Edmund P. Murray, is a chronicle of Minolta’s rise from the ashes and...
William L. Vance, of Boston University, had the brilliant idea of describing the relationship of citizens of a new nation to the civilization of a very old city. In the first volume, Vance concentrates on Americans’ reactions in literature and art to five important classical sites: the Roman Forum, the Colosseum, the Campagna, the Pantheon,...
Terry Eastland, formerly of the Reagan Justice Department, has written a learned book explaining that, according to the Constitution, embarrassing crimes in an administration can only be investigated by prosecutors on a leash held by the President whom those crimes embarrass. Eastland’s target is Title VI of the Ethics in Government Act of 1978, which...
“Many believe that the country is overextended and should reduce its external commitments. But in a world of growing interdependence among nations, this advice is the wrong answer, and U.S. decline is the wrong question.” So Joseph Nye begins his rebuttal of those doomsayers who have welcomed proclamations of America’s decline. If the nation’s loss...
In an attempt to lure immigrants to Arizona in 1881, Patrick Hamilton wrote, “Irrigation is the life of agriculture in the Territory. Without it scarcely anything can be raised; with it the soil is the most prolific in the west. Water, therefore, is the most precious element for the farmer in Arizona.” The same was—and...
“Accuse not nature, she hath done her part; Do thou but thine!” —John Milton Slow learners that we humans are, only recently have great numbers of us become aware of the tremendous, seemingly insurmountable ecological crises facing us. Some environmentalists date the earliest stirrings of this now-widespread awareness of the natural world and of our...
Florence King, a/k/a “Fascist Flossie,” “Ku Klux King,” and “the thinking man’s redneck,” is the author of Southern Ladies and Gentlemen, Reflections in a Jaundiced Eye, Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady, and a number of other books under her own name and several others. She is infamous, in a South full of unreconstructed Confederate...
If blood and soil are the stuff of nationalism, what does a Russian patriot do when the soil goes bad? He becomes an environmentalist—at least, this was the response of Valentin Rasputin (no relation to Gregory Rasputin who haunted the ill-fated reign of Tsar Nicholas II). But the Siberian-born Rasputin is more than another policy...
“Rational thought Calm, reasonable, gentle persuasion. It was this quality of moderation in his writing that most impressed me, for my own inclinations always tended toward the opposite, toward the impatient, the radical, the violent.” —Edward Abbey on Joseph Wood Krutch The name of Joseph Wood Krutch was well-known in its day, much less so...
It is probably fair to say that John Lukacs, the Hungarian-American historian and historical philosopher, author of 13 books, remains after more than forty years an enigma to American historians in particular and to American political intellectuals in general. The historical profession, which persists in refusing to accept him fully into the sodality, has been...
“In my honest and unbiased judgment, the Good Lord will place the Garden of Eden in North Carolina, when He restores it to earth. He will do this because He will have so few changes to make in order to achieve perfection.” —Sam J. Ervin Jr. William S. Powell’s magnificent portrayal of an American state...
This temperate and thorough book commences with a detailed description of President Nixon’s activities on May 8 and 9, 1970, when thousands of young people had poured into Washington to protest the American expedition into Cambodia. This was the most dramatic of the several crises in Richard Nixon’s life. As Dr. Parmet writes, “Nixon’s postmortem...
“The way to have power is to take it.” —W.M. Tweed When on January 3, 1949, Lyndon Baines Johnson of Texas was sworn in as a United States senator, an era in the politics of his state had come to an end, a period that had begun when Reconstruction concluded. Similar events occurred in other...
Gore Vidal’s “American chronicle” is a roman fleuve that looks beyond Powell’s The Music of Time to Roger Martin du Card’s Les Thibaults series of the 1920’s and 30’s, and what it demonstrates is that our assumptions about popular culture are incomplete, if not actually wrong. The notion that commercial success varies inversely with quality...
Kipling should be a fascinating subject for literary history. He was enormously gifted and successful, the child of a modest, nonconformist Anglo-Scot family that, besides producing him, also produced his cousin, the conservative prime minister Stanley Baldwin. One of his aunts married Edward Burne-Jones; another married Sir James Baldwin, chairman of the Great Western Railway,...
It’s a brave new world out there. Factory workers are made of metal and plastic; money, an increasingly abstract proposition, is made and lost not in workshops and fields but on flickering screens; databases grind through a million mainframes, assembling your biography and mine to a fantastic degree of detail; food is synthetic, and only...
“Send these, the homeless, tempest tossed to me.” —Emma Lazarus The publication of a Julian Simon book is a cause for rejoicing among advocates of laissez-faire and open-border immigration. According to Dr. Simon, who teaches business administration at the University of Maryland and is an adjunct scholar at the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute,...
Cormac McCarthy, 56-years-old, is the author of five published novels, which between them have sold approximately fifteen thousand copies in the original hardcover editions, published by Random House. (The Ecco Press, in New York City, is maintaining these titles in print in paperback.) Born in Rhode Island, reared in Tennessee, and traveled in Europe, McCarthy...
“Nobody would write verse if poetry were a question of ‘making oneself understood’; indeed, it is a question of making understood that quiddity which words alone fail to convey.” This much-quoted statement by Eugenio Montale, the Nobel Prizewinning Italian poet who died in 1981, may serve as an introduction to these Motets, a sequence of...
The struggle to keep poetry alive is a game of tag-team wrestling, and the greatest poets play their matches with the poets of ancient Greece and Rome. We all know it for Latin. Plautus and Vergil are centones of Greek verse, their originality hidden, for some, by passage after passage taken directly from Greek poetry....
In 1949 Chad Walsh, at that time an obscure poet and literary critic at Beloit College in Wisconsin, published the first book on C.S. Lewis. Entitled C.S. Lewis: Apostle to the Sceptics, this long out-of-print volume is still one of the best books written on the subject. In the forty years since Walsh established himself...
A few months past there came to visit us for a weekend, at our house in the backwoods, Mr. Andrew Lytle, man of letters, aged 87 years. Although there are not many big houses farther north than ours, and although Mr. Lytle is very much a man of the South, he felt at home here....
Remember Kate Millett? She made the cover of Time in 1970 after her dissection of literary machismo, Sexual Politics, became a blockbuster best-seller and won her the title of leading feminist spokesperson. It didn’t last. Although she was married, she soon announced that she was a lesbian, which split the women’s movement and destroyed her...
“Even a child is known by his doings.” —Proverbs 20:11 This book is at once a strange object and a peculiar event. To touch on the latter for a moment, it was excerpted before publication in the New York Times Sunday Magazine, which chose with an unerring eye those passages most damaging to Ronald Reagan...
This readable and remarkable book is the first in David Hackett Fischer’s projected series regarding American cultural history. In it, Fischer has drawn upon many sources of important information: narratives, statistics, linguistics, literature, diaries, topography, architecture, and political science. The result is a brilliant and formidable achievement, a major American contribution to the international tradition...
“By retaining one’s love of such things as trees, fishes, butterflies and toads, one makes a peaceful and decent future a little more probable.” —George Orwell With the death of Edward Abbey, aged 62, in March of last year, the Western portion of what once was really the United States lost her greatest defender of...
“A politician thinks of the next election; a statesman, of the next generation.” —James Freeman Clarke James Madison was not “The Father of the Constitution.” I know you were probably taught that in school. I myself am guilty of having foisted that old truism of the history classroom off on countless sullen but gullible undergraduates....
In the spring of 1962, the great Irish wit John F. Kennedy journeyed to New Haven to accept an honorary degree. He was in good form. “I now feel that I have the best of both worlds,” he told the graduating class. “A Harvard education and a Yale degree.” With the audience crawling into the...
Perhaps I am not the ideal reviewer for this book. I do not own a television, and I have not seen a movie in a dozen years. (I do have an AM-FM radio in my truck, which I use to monitor blizzards, sandstorms, flashfloods, and tornadoes.) I do not read People, Us, Self, TV Guide...
Nearly thirty years after his death in 1962, Robinson Jeffers occupies a secure niche in the pantheon of American poets. I suspect, indeed, that his place may well be the most secure of all. He has long since weathered the storm of disapproval that centered on his prophetic verse written before, during, and after World...
“The course of a river is almost always disapproved of by its source.” —Jean Cocteau There’s a story about the filming of The Big Sleep that ought to be true even if it isn’t. When Howard Hawks was supervising the final cut he realized he didn’t know who had killed the butler, so he summoned...
“The Jews are a race apart. They have made laws according to their own fashion, and keep them.” —Celsus Jacob Neusner’s bibliography is as long as the laundry list of a professional football team. Only in his mid-50’s, Neusner has published more than two hundred books—including detailed studies of the various rabbinic commentaries on the...
To pick up Tales of the Big Game Hunters is to suffer instant culture shock. The book plunges us into a world in which animals are slaughtered for the ivory, the skins, the racks, and the wonderful dangerous pleasure of the chase and kill. The British imperium is at its height, white supremacy unquestioned by...
This volume in tribute to Elizabeth Flower is loosely organized, with scarcely a mention of Flower’s work—the presumption doubtless being that the general sentiments and character of her work are best captured by such a gestaltist approach. While there is something to be said for such a loose organization, that only makes the reader grateful...
To calculate where a cannonball will land, it is necessary to know its initial angle of trajectory and the amount of force that propels it. It is the persuasive thesis of W. Bruce Lincoln that the Russian Civil War was the historic explosion that ever since has determined the direction and velocity of the Soviet...