Category: Reviews

This book gathers important information on the politicization of the schools, even the elementary schools, at the cost of facts—and flight from the world. The means of politicization: “nuclear education” is widespread, according to London’s rudimentary evidence. He contacted over 300 major school districts, and 16 of the 162 districts that answered had formal nuclear...

Charles Edward Eaton, in New and Selected Poems, as elsewhere, is a remarkable poet, a fine metrist and stylist, and a close disciple of Wallace Stevens in artistic skill and finesse as well as in theory and topics. Many a poet who buys whole hog and pen Stevens’ often-prevalent view of poetics (and thus poetry)...

Like many Englishmen of his generation, Charles Darwin in his youth was an avid reader of William Paley’s The Evidences of Christianity (1794). As Darwin formulated his theory of evolution, he lost his faith in Paley’s argument that nature manifests God’s wisdom and foresight. “The old argument from design in nature,” he wrote in his’...

Just what is a truly Christian, or biblical, view of politics and government, and what difference does it make for public policy? Doug Bandow, senior fellow at the Cato Institute, treats this and many other questions with a fresh perspective. Not to be pigeonholed, he works for a largely libertarian think tank but espouses policies...

John Cardinal O’Connor, the distinguished and controversial head of the archdiocese of New York, has played an important role in affecting American politics, both inside and outside the Catholic Church. He is the pope’s point man in the battle for the soul of the US Church, and some say if an American were considered for...

“Diplomacy is utterly useless where there is no force behind it.” —Theodore Roosevelt From the elevation of arms control to the opening of talks with the PLO, the course of American foreign policy in recent years has led some to wonder why Ronald Reagan was once considered such a contrast to Jimmy Carter. The cycle...

In Twin Powers, Thomas Molnar, one of our age’s most imaginative and creative thinkers, confronts us, like Hannah Arendt and Eric Voegelin before him, with an analysis of our social, political, and cultural situation that is both fascinating and frustrating: fascinating, because it seems to explain so much; frustrating, because it appears very difficult to...

“To conquer tumult, nature’s sodin force, War . . . was first devis’d.” —Sir William D’Avenant Grenada’s Communist interlude has become the subject of an intense postmortem by scholars of varying ideological hues. Historically, the small island is destined to be a symbol of the Reagan years. However much the US intervention of October 25,...

This yearbook, prepared by Freedom House—a private nonprofit foundation from New York—is the tenth in the series of annual comparative surveys of political and civil liberties in the world. Started in 1972, the Freedom House project to assess the status of freedom around the globe has become an indispensable gauge for anyone interested in the...

“Talent is an adornment; an adornment is also a concealment.” —Nietzsche “I think one’s letters ought to be X about oneself (I live up to this theory!)—what else is there to talk about? Letters should be indiscretions—otherwise they are simply official bulletins.” So T.S. Eliot remarked to his Harvard classmate, the poet Conrad Aiken, in...

Two-Step is a tall, skinny black man who has lived at the Nashville Union Rescue Mission for seven years. In nice weather he can be seen standing beside the Mission holding his pajama bottom up with one hand and doing a slow, rhythmical shuffle, hour after hour. He has been doing this since he was...

“Children begin by loving their parents. After a time they judge them. Rarely, if ever, do they forgive them.” —Oscar Wilde Louis Simpson stands as an easy example of the poet divided, whose best talents and strongest predilections are at odds with one another. He takes Walt Whitman as spiritual father and his relationship with...

Twenty-five years ago when I was a schoolteacher in an Afghan mountain valley I came across a book by an English pedagogue called Teaching English Under Difficult Circumstances. I was reminded of that title as I read this informative monograph by Middle East commentator Antony Sullivan. His short book might have been subtitled, “Teaching the...

The first writer known to have made the outrageous accusation of ritual cannibalism against the Jews was a pagan Greek named Apion. But it was the Christians who established prejudice against and hatred for Jews as a fixture of Western civilization. The Christians’ animus against the Jews derived from the idea that “the Jews” had...

In 1840, when Edgar Allan Poe wrote the first modern detective story, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” an unsuspecting public scarcely realized it was witnessing the birth of a new genre that would actually become the most ecumenical of all literary forms. Since Poe’s time, the detective story has flourished among readers of every...

In Pursuit is a philosophical exegesis on what is wrong with contemporary social policy analysis. In some ways it is a sequel to Murray’s Losing Ground, having much in common with Part IV (Rethinking Social Policy) of that influential book. Though this is a more enterprising work, it is also a less successful one, leaving...

The facts of George Garrett’s literary career are laid out in the bibliography here: his 24 books include novels, plays, and collections of poems and short stories. In addition he has served as editor of 17 other books—interviews with contemporary writers, literary criticism, books on film scripts. He has also written a biography of the...

Discussions of the future of apartheid generally assume that South Africa must remain a homogenous “unitary state.” This assumption not only presents a paralyzing dilemma (either democracy or apartheid), but also a prescription for continued social turmoil, if not outright civil war. A unitary state is a “winner take all” state—if there are indeed only...

“Poetry is certainly something more than good sense, but it must be good sense . . . just as a palace is more than a house, but it must be a house.” —Samuel Taylor Coleridge Margaret Atwood writes in her poem “Mushrooms”: Here is the handful of shadow I have brought back to you, this...

Terrorism has been a plague for Western democracies over the past decade, but in France and Britain it has not been a fatal disease. Other countries have not been so lucky. The Tupamaros of Uruguay took a country that, with all its problems of inflation and corruption, enjoyed 90 percent literacy, low infant mortality, and...

Concocted by four editors of something called Equator magazine (I am told it is a large glossy tabloid of odd people doing odd things), Hot Type‘s subtitle is: “Our Most Celebrated Writers Introduce the Next Word in Contemporary American Fiction.” On the basis of the writing selected, I don’t know if I would let some...

“And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.” —Genesis 2.7 The 19th century had an unfortunate passion for novels in verse. I have tried to read some of the more celebrated, notably Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora...

“My goal from the beginning,” states Caldwell, “was to be a writer of fiction that revealed . . . the inner spirit of men and women as they responded to the joys of life and reacted to the sorrows of existence.” The conclusion, however, of what he sought to achieve “with all my might” is...

It is a distinct possibility that we leave to posterity writers and works from which the future curious will conclude that this century was the stupidest, most verbose and obscene, altogether the worst in the historical record. What else can you say of a century that elected Michel Foucault as one of its mâitres à...

Andrew Lytle and Allen Tate, two of the original Vanderbilt Agrarians, maintained a remarkable friendship spanning some half a century, from the early 20’s until Tate’s death in 1979. While both pursued prolific literary careers, their paths crossed less frequently, particularly as Tate became identified with modernist poetry and criticism in the Eliot tradition. Lytle,...

We all know something of cities that thrived once and then for one reason or another ceased to exist—preclassical cities we read about in myth and epic; Homer’s Troy or St. Paul’s Ephesus. So used are we to thinking of these extinct places as ancient and, therefore, remote, that it is hard to conceive, as...

“Very few care for beauty; but anyone can be interested in gossip.” —C.S. Lewis In 1982 The Village Voice published an article accusing the famous Polish emigre writer Jerzy Kosinski of being a fraud. The authors (Geoffrey Stokes and Eliot Fremont-Smith) argued that Kosinski’s novels had all received extensive and unacknowledged “help” from various editorial...

“Take these two books,” is an entirely arbitrary prompting by an editor who happened to have them around on a shelf. Willy-nilly, here they are together, and one looks at them, shuffling through the poems, some familiar and some not. And there is a moment when the rightness of the conjunction seems wonderful! A piece...

John Randolph (1773-1833) survives in America’s footnotes as a colorful contrarian, and the Gore Vidal school of historiography pants at his duel with Henry Clay and his taste for opium. A master rhetorician, he left a long list of choice barbs, nearly all concocted on the spur of the moment. James Kilpatrick characterized the errant...

Under the tyranny of ideology that is a grim fact of contemporary life in university English departments, it is tempting to reflect on the career of Lionel Trilling (1905-1975) with an uncritical wistfulness. It is to Stephen Tanner’s credit that his astute and balanced introductory study resists such a temptation; for however much Trilling’s criticism...

When sociologists look at religion, what do they see? Inevitably, they see statistical clusters of churchgoers sorted through ecclesiastical, geographic, and demographic grids. People who want to assess contemporary social trends in American religion would do well to consult this new volume by Rodney Stark and William Sims Bainbridge. In impressive detail. Stark and Bainbridge...

Americans find Italy a paradox. We love vacationing in a country with such delicious food, friendly people, and so many historical and cultural monuments. Its politics, however, bother us. After 20 years of one party rule, from 1923-43, it seemed to rebound into virtual chaos. There have been 46 governments since World War II, not...

Paul Fussell’s enemies are “habitual euphemizers, professional dissimulators,” and the “Disneyfiers of life.” He is in favor of cojones, which is why he ends up in one of his essays liking the Indy 500 in spite of himself, comparing it favorably to the violence of the Falklands War, which is going on while he watches...

Lewis was fond of referring to himself as an Old Western Man, one of a soon-to-be-extinct species: a veritable dinosaur. As a classically educated member of the Anglo-Irish middle class, one born at the turn of the century, his opinions to most modernists must certainly appear Paleolithic. He was not a political man, seldom read...

Father Francis P. Canavan, S.J., with the publication of this his second book on Edmund Burke, clearly establishes himself as one of the most—if not the most—able interpreter of Burke’s political philosophy. Here Canavan focuses upon topics of enormous import for fathoming Burke’s political philosophy, including theological influences on Burke, his religious faith, the relationship...

Are religion and psychology enemies or allies? Can religion and psychology peacefully coexist? Can religion and psychology work together for the sake of social progress? Man and Mind, an anthology of thought-provoking essays, seeks to provide answers to these questions. The essayists are united in their conviction that most modern psychologists consider psychology a good...

Over in my philosophy department they used to shake their heads and smile. They didn’t actually pat me on the head or anything; professors don’t do that. But they did get a kick out of what they saw as my naiveté. “How sweet,” they seemed to think, “that he could really believe that philosophy is,...