Category: Reviews

It was one of those Saturday nights that spills over into Sunday morning. Invited into the home of a main-line Protestant couple in split-level northern New Jersey, the 40ish group was made up of Jews and Roman Catholics from the neighborhood and of visiting Southern Baptists from Texas. After enjoying much conversation and suffering the...

One of the more curious features of our time is the inordinate attention given by the Reagan administration and the American media to Libya and its mercurial dictator, Muammar Qaddafi. Sporadic outbursts in Washington, echoed in the press, have served to elevate the unstable ruler of a weak. Third World police state to almost superhuman...

“In the end physics will replace ethics just as metaphysics displaced theology. The modern statistical view of ethics contributes toward that.” —Soren Kierkegaard When the historical sequence of men, of societies, of time and thought failed Henry Adams—sequences that might have yielded him some meaning about life—he remarked in The Education that he found himself...

Any reader familiar with Martin Amis’ novels—especially his most recent, Money: A Suicide Note (1984)—will not be surprised by the relentlessly contemptuous tone of The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America, a collection of his essays and articles on America and Americans. While Amis confesses at the outset that he “feel[s] fractionally American” (his...

Those of us who have helped to found conservative campus journals envy The American Spectator. Born in 1967 into modest circumstances—as upstart samizdat published out of a farmhouse by four Indiana University students—it has gone on to achieve nationwide distribution, a distinguished list of subscribers, and a 500-page anniversary collection of its work from a...

The Irish have a word—as they are supposed to—for this sort of book: blather. The author could be described as one of those fellows who “does go on,” to the point of being, eventually, barred from the pub for boring everyone to tears. The Gun in Politics bears the subtitle “An Analysis of Irish Political...

“The mind of the bigot is like the pupil of the eye; the more light you pour upon it, the more it will contract.” —O.W. Holmes Jr. In July 1865 John R. Dennett, a Massachusetts journalist and recent graduate of Harvard College, arrived in Norfolk, Virginia, the first stop on an eight-month journey that would...

“By their fruits, so shall ye know them.” —Jesus of Nazareth The year 1986 marked the 100th anniversary of the birth of Ludwig Mies, the man who, under the name of Mies van der Rohe, did the most to shape modern American architecture. Of the numerous books that marked Fred Butzen is a technical writer...

The old saw tells us that all things come to those who wait. And what a joy it is to find Andrew Lytle, in his vigorous 80’s, receiving his just due, however late. The Richard Weaver Award by The Ingersoll Foundation, a generous grant by the Lyndhurst Foundation for his contribution to his Southern culture,...

It is a common fact of our century—appreciated most by George Orwell—that men who lust after power will distort words to gain their own ends. In 1933, a significant distortion took place. A group of men, John Dewey among them, drafted and published a now famous document, the Humanist Manifesto I, in which they declared...

“He can be compelled who does not know how to die.” —Seneca “That’s IT. I’ve HAD it with bourgeois-liberal guilt!” In disgust, my friend slammed Lillian Rubin’s new book back across the table at me. We had been reading a hospital scene (one of many) from Quiet Rage, Rubin’s account of the Bernhard Goetz case:...

Cows sacred, evil, and venal are shot by Vladimir Voinovich in this satiric look at the Soviet Union that reads like a combination “Ivan in Wonderland” and Zamiatin’s WE. The hero of Moscow 2042, like Voinovich, is a Soviet émigré writer living in West Germany. Our protagonist, Vitaly Kartsev, takes a 30-day trip by airplane...

“And somewhere, waiting for its birth, / The shaft is in the stone.” —Henry Timrod Searching for the “Southern quality” once identified by Marshall McLuhan can be an absorbing and rewarding quest. After all, the South is a vast and varied region, one that has, as things go in this country, a lot of history...

In that bloated morass called American higher education, only a few institutions remain that are committed to the classical virtues and to learning as an induction into Western civilization. Hillsdale College is counted among that number. Credit for holding that course goes to George Roche, who as the institution’s president has labored to defend the...

“Of all the frauds that ever have been perpetrated on our generation, this ‘psychography’ is the worst,” wrote Douglas Southall Freeman a few weeks before his death, adding, “How dare a man say what another man is thinking when he may not know what he himself is thinking!” This criticism is what the distinguished biographer...

Horace Greeley may have had it right for his 19th-century compatriots, but the proper direction for the ambitious voyagers of this century has too often been eastward. Just ask New Mexico’s own Samuel Andrew Donaldson. No one asked her, but Chloe Hampson Donaldson thinks she knows why her son strayed from the straight and narrow...

“I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.” —Thomas Jefferson With the exception of the driven and depressed Lincoln, no major figure in American history is, in the final analysis, more enigmatic than Jefferson. Without any exception, none is more complex. There is more to the enigma and complexity than a...

“Look how wide also the east is from the west: so far hath he set our sins from us.” —Psalm 103 It has been said that an intellectual is someone who can listen to the William Tell Overture without thinking of the Lone Ranger. But the life of the mind hardly requires that William and...

The premise of Citizen Diplomats by Gale Warner and Michael Shuman, with a foreword by Carl Sagan, is simple: America’s elected politicians and professional diplomats have been so inadequate in managing relations with the Soviet Union and coping with the nuclear threat that concerned citizens themselves should do all they can to improve our understanding...

“Tell me, can you find indeed Nothing sure, no moral plan Clear prescribed, without your creed?” —Matthew Arnold Awaiting trial for a murder he did not commit, Dmitri Karamazov is visited in jail in the closing pages of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov by the progressive intellectual Rakitin. Rakitin tries to explain why modern ethics no...

“In politics a community of hatred is almost always the foundation of friendships.” —Tocqueville Norman Podhoretz, in the March 11, 1987, Washington Post, describes Sidney Hook as “one of the most courageous intellectuals of the twentieth century.” While this particular description may more aptly be used for Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and others who have fought for...

“They say such different things at school.” -W.B. Yeats William Butler Yeats, Senator of the Irish Republic, heard about contemporary trends in education from “a kind old nun in a white hood”: The children learn to cipher and to sing, to study reading-books and history, to cut and sew, be neat in everything in the...

Dr. Lavoie, assistant professor of economics at George Mason University, argues that planning—whether Marxism, economic democracy, or other designation—must inevitably disrupt social and economic coordination. The problem of how to effectively use knowledge in society to produce the goods and services which the public wants cannot be solved by central planning and control. Lavoie takes...

“Sed quis custodiet ipsos Custodes?” —Juvenal On November 29, 1984, an FBI agent in Massachusetts took extensive notes from a long conversation with an alcoholic woman about the alleged Soviet spy activities of her former husband, John Walker. Barbara Walker initiated the meeting with a phone call on November 17. Her story was filed and...

A renaissance of American interest in contemporary Africa has been stimulated by media blitzes on famine-ridden Ethiopia and politically volatile South Africa, and by an award- winning film about a Norwegian adulteress’s African farm. Among the current crop of books is David Lamb’s The Africans, an update of a 1983 book. Lamb, who spent four...

Along with Xenophon and Plutarch, Herodotus may be the most underappreciated writer of antiquity. His Histories (by which he meant something like “investigations”) of the relations between Greeks and barbarians has more narrative power than most novels, more colorful incidents than any travel book, and more insight into human nature than any 1,000 works of...

Sprawled on the sands of the New Mexico desert, Isador Isaac Rabi was witness on July 16, 1945, to a demonstration of scientific power so spectacular that neither his welder’s glasses nor his analytical training could fully shield him from its awe-inspiring effects: Suddenly, there was an enormous flash of light, the brightest light I...

History has a way of taking its revenge on those who would violate it. It does not forget. Mikhail Heller and Aleksandr Nekrich are some of the few Soviet-born intellectuals who have studied how much current Soviet policies and propaganda abuse Russian history. Their book is an eloquent effort to set straight the historical record...

American poetry has for the past few decades been going through what can only be called an adolescence, discarding rules and conventions simply because they existed. Poetry and all the arts go through a healthy siege of anarchy every so often, but this was more like terrorism than a revolution; these revolutionaries, unlike the Romantics,...

Zulfikar Chose was born in Pakistan, grew up in British India, emigrated to England in 1952, and since 1969 has taught in the English department of the University of Texas. He is married to a Brazilian and has enough knowledge of South America to write novels set there. This is his 10th novel. He has...

“Rural areas are shrinking, accents are becoming less distinct, and Southerners are being tamed,” writes Pete Daniels of the changes which have transformed the agrarian nation of Davis and Lee into the modern South. Daniels may have his feet planted firmly in earthy Southern history, but there has not been a concerted demand by creationists...

“Female murderers get sheaves of offers of marriage.” —Shaw In a recent issue of The Nation, John L. Hess complains about the current flow of books demythologizing the venerated martyrs of the American left. So what if new historical research suggests that the Rosenbergs (or at least one of them) were actually guilty? So what...

“Every scarecrow secretly desires to terrorize.” —Stanislaw Lee When, from time to time, a responsible official in the United States suggests we employ our abundance of food as a “weapon” in our struggle with Communist totalitarianism, a clamor of protest arises from one end of the country to the other. But when the Communists wield...

“Every sect is a moral check on its neighbor. Competition is as wholesome in religion as in commerce.” —Walter Savage Landor When English Protestants fled their native land during Mary’s reign, many of them ended up in John Calvin’s Geneva. Additional refugees found a home in other Reformed cities in southwestern Germany. Lutheran lands, by...