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...
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...
“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....
Nearly sixty years ago John Peale Bishop published a remarkable essay in the Virginia Quarterly Review entitled “The South and Tradition.” In it he ruminated on the Old South—its glories and failings—and said that the South had a civilization because like civilizations elsewhere (in Rome, France, England) there was “a continuous succession of manners, which...
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...
“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...
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...
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...
“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...
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...
There are three ways in which the word “magician” may be applied to the critic and author Edmund Wilson: in his relationship to the printed word, in his relationships with women, and, more literally, as a straightforward reference to the fact of his having been a lifelong student and practitioner of “magical” tricks. All three...
The road to hell, I was taught as a child, is paved with good intentions. Surely no one could fault the intentions of the Reverend Ralph David Abernathy—Martin Luther King’s right arm and successor in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference—as revealed in this fascinating and moving autobiography. Inspired by faith in Divine mercy, by a...
Madison Smartt Bell has a penchant for keeping his fiction mysterious at its deepest core. The protagonist of his 1985 novel, Waiting for the End of the World, is a fellow called Larkin who is out to destroy New York City for no reason a reader can ever discern. The willful wackos who give The...
How neglectful of David Dubai not to write the great book on the piano, especially considering what a fine position he was in to do so! So let’s get the unpleasantness out of the way first, before reviewing the merits of his study. The Art of the Piano is internally divided against itself in more...
“Without the aid of prejudice and custom, I should not be able to find my way across the room.” —William Hazlitt Rarely does a published diary, even of a celebrated writer, become anything more than fodder for the specialist. Yet H.L. Mencken’s diary has been turned into a cause célèbre by its editor, Charles A....
“The history of the world is the judge of the world.” —Hermann Ullmann Two ironies attend the life and career of Whittaker Chambers. The first is that the one-time Communist spy, foreign editor of Time, and witness against Soviet espionage became notable during his life and afterwards only because of the Hiss Case, which brought...
John Taft’s book is a history of American foreign policy from World War I through the Vietnam War, as exemplified by the careers of prominent “liberal internationalists” who dominated the policymaking process: William Bullit, Averell Harriman, George Kennan, Chester Bowles, Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., Dean Acheson, David Bruce, John Foster Dulles, Herbert Hoover, Ellsworth Bunker,...
There is no conflict, M.E. Bradford insists, “between preserving the language and securing a civil polity,” a credo which, embedded in “What We Can Know For Certain: Frank Owsley and the Recovery of Southern History,” provides the subtext for the work as a whole. Not only does a relationship between language and polity exist, it...
David Novak, Professor of Modern Jewish Thought at the University of Virginia, sets out to argue the case for what is called Jewish-Christian “dialogue.” Unfortunately, the author never gives us anything but the most offhand idea of what he means by the term, but we can assume he means the activity carried out largely by...
Since 19th-century music is usually the music that we know best, and often like the best, and since too this volume appears to be printed as a textbook, we may have more than one reason for wanting to read a new book that could change the definition of its topic and our way of looking...
If strange things are happening in the academy, perhaps none is stranger than the debate concerning the American literary canon provoked in part by the current reassessment of Ernest Hemingway’s fiction. Recently, for instance, Professor Lawrence Buell of Oberlin College demanded a new non sexist literary criticism that will “foment reorderings in the pre-feminist canon...
Betty Friedan launched The Feminine Mystique on an unsuspecting world over a quarter of a century ago, and life, as it turns out, has never been the same since. To explain the soul-depleting misery and sense of purposelessness she claimed for modern, middle-class American house wives, Friedan concocted a theory of male conspiracy, a conspiracy...
For a conservative, no engagement can be more important than edu cation. A conservative is one who distinguishes his outlook from others—socialist and liberal, for example—by his concern, not with the standpoint of here and now, but with the perspective of those who have come before us and those as yet unborn. Where liberalism and...
“The fathers have eaten a sour grape, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.” —Jeremiah Why has the South had such a flowering of letters in the interval between World War I and the Korean War? Flannery O’Connor responded to that question by quoting the answer Walker Percy gave when he received the National...
“An idea is a putting truth in checkmate.” —Ortega y Gasset Philosophy in the 20th century has shared the fate of other high arts whose audiences are increasingly limited to an inner circle of adepts. This is partly the fault of a culture that aims at mass production and mass communication, but a good part...
In The Conscience of a Conservative, Barry Goldwater wrote: Foreign aid has been characterized by waste and extravagance both overseas and in the agencies that administer it . . . Our present Foreign Aid Program, in sum, is not only ill-administered, but ill conceived. It has not made the free world stronger, it has made...
“There is Jackson standing like a stone wall. Rally behind the Virginians.” —Barnard Elliott Bee We were British colonists for a long time. From the first permanent English colony on the mainland of North America Jamestown, 1607) until the first guns of the American War of Independence (outside Boston, 1775) is 168 years. That is...
When the South African government was committed to perpetuating apartheid into the future, there were few in the West calling for economic sanctions. Only as South Africa has embarked upon reform—an end to the pass laws; an end to bans on black workers joining labor unions; integration of sports, hotels, restaurants—has such a campaign been...
“The land of the heart is the land of the West.” Catholic readers of American literature have always recognized that the difference between Eastern and Western fiction is the difference between New Canaan, Connecticut, and Tuba City, Arizona. A. Carl Bredahl’s book is a comprehensive as well as original attempt at defining the nature, of...
The publication of Eric Voegelin’s Autobiographical Reflections is a small but highly significant step in an enormous project that has been undertaken by the Louisiana State University Press, the publication of his collected works. The editors estimate that, in all, this project will run to 34 volumes, at least 15 of which will include heretofore...
“As civilization advances, poetry almost necessarily declines.” —T.B. Macaulny “Few people,” we find Frank Kermode saying by page 42 of his 46-page Prologue,—”Few people can take much pleasure in modern academic literary criticism except its practitioners, who do not mind that an intelligent outsider would surely find it both arcane and depressing.” That means, the...
The last time we heard Jess Kirkman tell stories about his father’s wondrous, humble life was in I Am One of You Forever (1985), a work of power and humor and charm. That book reminded me, however, that the word “novel” has hardly any meaning nowadays, for the work seemed a suite of stories united...
Charley Bland, as his father describes him, would have been a prodigal son except he never had the gumption to leave home. Still, he has the charm most lost souls have, and for the widowed, 35-year-old narrator of Mary Lee Settle’s eleventh novel, returned home to West Virginia from a Bohemian life in Europe, this...
The 50th anniversary of the outbreak of World War II has occasioned an outpouring of nostalgic literature in Great Britain. The elegiac note may be appropriate: the year 1939 was, after all, a great point of rupture. Out went big houses, servants, elegant restaurants, and high fashion; in came universal military service, rationing, government canteens...
Because of the great range of his interests, it is very difficult to predict what Professor Jeffrey Hart will next produce. Hart writes out of a devotion to literature as “the principal vehicle for transmitting the ideas and feelings that constitute our shared public culture.” Following the examples of public-spirited critics running from Samuel Johnson...
Two of the most vilified judges in US history have probably been Judge Robert H. Bork and Chief Justice Roger Taney. Both gained notoriety early in their appointments by demonstrating their willingness to fire opponents of a domineering President’s policy (Taney, when in the Jackson administration, fired directors of the Bank of the United States...
“All mental revolutions are attended by catastrophe.” —W. Winwood Reade George Gilder’s strength as a writer is his ability to create vivid mythic archetypes saturated with his own romantic feelings. He is not comfortable with ideas unless they are strong, simple ideas that lend themselves to vivid evocation of feeling rather than complex rumination: the...
It may possibly be a virtue to maintain a diary, and probably it is no sin to publish one. In the first case, the virtue is enhanced, in the second the potential for sin mitigated, by the diarist having been a regular and faithful one; and in this respect anyway George Frost Kennan is as...
What an inspiring book this is! Even though the trials of the literary life are notorious and banal, there are few of us who are sufficiently hardened to the blows that we don’t at least on occasion allow our guard to fall and make the mistake of taking the kicks and pricks personally. Old pro...
Paul Johnson’s book Intellectuals, published last year, chronicles the transgressions of modern avatars of wisdom (among them Rousseau, Marx, and Sartre) who, while professing a fervent devotion to humanity, behaved inhumanly toward those most meriting their compassion—spouses, lovers, family, friends, and associates. Although the targets of Johnson’s caustic pen all were idols of the left,...
“Step into the shoes of him who lures the enemy to death.” —from the Navajo Enemy Way On a windswept bluff high above the reddish-brown San Juan River, four states—Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, and Colorado—converge. Visitors to the area come to play a game of twister at the Four Comers Monument, contorting themselves so that...
“When family pride ceases to act, individual selfishness comes into play.” —Tocqueville “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” I’ve always thought that Tolstoy underestimated the variety of happy families, but his dictum definitely holds true from at least one point of view, that of family law. While...
In a spate of recent books, neoconservatives have rehearsed the drama of their radicalization and subsequent deradicalization. Typically the curtain rises on their active participation in, or engaged sympathy for, leftist movements of the 1960’s, and falls after they have regained their equilibrium and embraced liberal democracy. One thinks, for example, of former Ramparts editors...
Moving by fits and starts, this biography of the Southern novelist and wife of Allen Tate lacks focus and—ultimately—purpose. Veronica Makowsky’s is a dull account of an inherently interesting subject. This relatively small book is essentially a failure, rendering, as it does, a diminished, fragmented, and elusive portrait of Caroline Gordon. The book does include...
A thousand-page book, like a thousand-foot ship, must not disappoint; unfortunately, Karl Frederick’s William Faulkner is the QE II of American literary biography. “This book attempts,” Professor Karl states in his foreword, “to integrate the latest in biographical information with Faulkner’s own large body of work in fiction and poetry.” He adds that, “It will...
Marlowe’s back, and Parker’s got him. Well he should. Parker knows every one of Chandler’s quirks: he wrote part of his dissertation about Chandler twenty years ago. And then he started writing his Spenser books. (Where do you suppose he got the idea to name his private eye after a 16th-century English poet?) But Spenser...
The evident purpose of Taming the Prince is to provide a respectable philosophical pedigree for the usurpations and abuses of power by American Presidents since FDR. (Professor Mansfield dedicates the book to his father, “constant advocate of a strong presidency from Franklin Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan.”) Where conservatives such as Corwin, Kendall, Burnham, and Samuel...
“Truth rests with God alone, and a little bit with me.” —Yiddish Proverb Moshe Leshem ends Balaam’s Curse with a warning against the growing political power of the Israeli Orthodox rabbinate. By yielding to Orthodox authorities on educational and cultural matters, he says, Israelis are sacrificing their democratic patrimony. For the sake of Israeli democracy...