Category: Reviews

Oxford University Press advertises its Past Master series (of which this book is one) as being “a noble encyclopaedia of the history of ideas” in which “lucid and authoritative” modern critics introduce us to the best of what has been thought and written. Oxford seems to have dropped a brick on this one. Lucid? Here...

“Evening must usher night, night urge the morrow, month follow month with woe, and year wake year to sorrow.” —Shelley The Book-of-the-Month Club, now in its 60th year, is an American success story in the grand manner—its financial success demonstrated by listing on the New York Stock Exchange and later acquisition by Time, Inc., its...

Benjamin Ginsberg’s The Captive Public is a breath of fresh cynicism. With insight and illustration, it argues that mass opinion and majority will are not necessarily the nemesis of Big Brother. In modern society, Ginsberg argues, the Orwellian state can adapt and even mold them for its purposes. Nor is this a new development. Ginsberg...

A recent issue of Forbes contained the truly wonderful news that a corporation is now selling a video encyclopedia of the 20th century. This is sure to be a hot item in the “education technology” business. Today’s students, who dislike ordinary encyclopedias because they must be read, can now “tap into the visual side of...

“We know the good but do not practice it.” —Euripides These two unusually interesting collections of studies are in sharp contrast to the contemporary Anglo-Saxon style of academic scholarship. Both authors take seriously the pertinence of classical thought to contemporary discussions of the good. Strauss is even less professorial than Gadamer in that he takes...

“Sic omnia fatis in peius ruere ac retro sublapsa referre.” (All mortal things are subject to decay.) —Vergil This is a handsome book in all pertinent respects. It is stately of subject, nicely written, well-edited, and eye-winning in cover—especially the jacket. Roberts, a well-known British historian and university chancellor, has written the book, we are...

If it is true that the Constitution of the United States is to be construed by its intent rather than by mysterious and highly malleable forces of “evolution,” then recovery of the intellectual context out of which it arose is of the highest priority. However, the discovery of intent is primarily a question of historical...

“Shall they hoist me up and show me to the shouting varletry of censuring Rome?” —William Shakespeare The true facts of the case will lie hidden in time forever. For our purpose here, we can accept the official version; that the emperor Augustus in the year 8 A.D. exiled the poet Ovid to Tomis, a...

Auberon Waugh’s finely sharpened pen cuts through the mist of illusions that prevent Americans from seeing Britain as it is. In these articles from the Spectator, he exposes a society nearly gone mad. Royalty and commoner, young and old, liberal and conservative are routed by Waugh’s scathing satire. He writes of the follies of socialism...

Malcolm Bradbury describes Peter Handke as “unmistakably one of the best writers we have in that selfdiscovering tendency in contemporary writing we have chosen to call postmodernism.” And, true enough, Handke is eminently skillful at what he sets out to do. Poet and playwright as well as novelist, he is concerned above all with exploring...

“He canonizes himself a Saint in his own lifetime.” —Samuel Butler Exhibitionism is a sin yet to be legitimized in Father Andrew Greeley’s ongoing excursion into soft porn (or those novels which he euphemistically christens his “comedies of grace”). But Greeley, the exhibitionist, is on full display in his venture into autobiography (or this book...

Two decades ago, the general managers of professional football teams discovered that the highly specialized jobs of placekicking could be done by sometime soccer players, most of them born and raised abroad. The placekicker, we remember, is often called upon to deliver a field goal whose three points, especially in the game’s concluding moments, can...

“A motive fair to Learning’s imps he gave. . . . “ —William Shenstone American education has never been in very good shape, so criticizing it now would be a redundancy, except for the fact that we are facing an increasing teacher shortage across the curricula and across all grade levels which shows no signs...

A former literary editor of The Spectator in London and currently touted as the new novelist of manners, A.N. Wilson was the author several seasons ago of a creditable biography of Hilaire Belloc. But the novels Wise Virgin (1983), Scandal (1984), and Gentlemen in England, just published in this country, remain chiefly responsible for his...

From front cover to back, the total “package” of George Garrett’s new novel, Poison Pen, is a shuck and a con. No fictional work in recent memory is so elaborate a satire, and a reader would have to go back to the 18th-century Augustans to find its equal. To begin with, the jacket’s slick black...

George Nash, the historian of post-World War II American conservatism, in a recent speech at Hillsdale College in Michigan called for a conservatism which would attempt to change the world as well as to understand it—a conservatism of politics as well as of scholarship. Conservatism, Nash declared, “must succeed in the arena of polities, not...

Much of the bioregional vision should appeal to conservative sentiments. As the pitiful remnant of America’s agrarian culture again falls victim to drought and depression, the bioregionalists call for a return to the land, a reconstruction of self-sufficient farm life, and a reverence toward the soil as the organic bond of human generations. As Ortega...

Despite his Viennese birth, Peter Drucker enjoys a reputation as a leading American social analyst, particularly on industrial and economic issues. In Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Drucker interprets U.S. management theory and practice within the framework of the free market economy and the open society, as he seeks to define entrepreneurship as “a craft” essential for...

In these two recent spy thrillers, William F. Buckley’s CIA-trained alter ego makes his sixth and seventh appearances in a decade to play a winning hand in the high-stakes intrigue surrounding crucial moments in the Cold War. On a secret mission to Cuba (Project Alligator) aimed at exploring with Che Guevara possibilities for easing tensions...

During the well-publicized oil crisis of the I970’s, populists looking for an easy answer to the problem of excruciatingly long lines at gas stations reflexively blamed the big oil companies. These barons of black gold were accused of bilking the public. So widespread was this sentiment that President Carter himself joined the chorus of blame....

As a member of the last generation of English middle-class boys brought up on great expectations of prosperity, glamour, and power, John Le Carré first became famous in America when his obsession with the failed promise of his own society supplied an analogy for American middle-class readers jaded by the extravagant claims being made for...

Most persons now living can expect to witness the turning from the second to the third millennium of the Christian era. The year 2000 anno Domini looms as a seeming tower in time, commanding our attentive awe as we approach it. But in our age there is something oddly jarring about “the year of our...

Communist governments arrest and imprison citizens who express opinions at variance with official orthodoxies. There is hardly an educated American or European who doesn’t know that much. They are also aware that these citizens suffer torture and abuse for many years in those prisons. But it takes more than knowledge to appreciate what goes on...

John Ashbery is a familiar name to readers of contemporary American poetry and art criticism. He is, one might say, the poetry establishment and the art establishment woven into one. He has won all the honors, including a lucrative MacArthur Fellowship (which came to him, predictably, after it might have been needed). With this background,...

“I pray you think you question with the Jew.” —William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice The Jews Under Roman and Byzantine Rule has already appeared in German and Hebrew editions by the same polyglot author who has now produced the English translation. Avi-Yonah has mined Greek, Hebrew, and Latin sources and puts into his footnotes...

Years ago, I was a different person. I looked different, thought differently, acted differently. And yet I am also the same person; there is no doubt in my mind that the “I” of, say, 10 years ago is fundamentally the same person as the one now writing this review. Evidently “I” cannot be identified neatly...

” . . . Words strain, Crack and sometimes break. . . . “ —T.S. Eliot The ancients, wiser than modem theorists, recognized language as a gift and (at Babel) a curse from the heavens. Even pagans recognized a Word behind words and a Muse beyond music. The Creator of the world was everywhere acknowledged...

The situation is familiar to any student of socialist revolutions: The revolution is over, and the political apparatus has become authoritarian and alienated from its popular base. The lives of real people become less important than the economic programs and ideological causes of a growing bureaucracy. Then come suspicion, repression, overzealous police vigilance, persecution of...

As essayists go, John McPhee has be come something of a celebrity. He has been praised in places as diverse as National Review and National Public Radio; he has written 18 books and no telling how many articles; moreover, he is said to be the best thing The New Yorker, in its decrepitude, has going...

USSR Facts & Figures Annual is an excellent source of current statistical and factual information on the Soviet Union. Since 1977, Academic International Press has published an annual volume for anyone who needs to keep up to date on developments in the Soviet Union. The updated as well as new information covers such topics as...

“One night,” said Uncle Remus—taking Miss Sally’s little boy on his knee, and stroking the child’s hair thoughtfully and caressingly—”one night Brer Possum call by fer Brer Coon, cordin ter greement, an atter gobblin up a dish er fried greens en smokin’ a seegyar, dey rambled fort fer ter see how de balance er de settlement...

Collections of previously published cartoons are usually greeted among “serious” readers by a dignified silence signifying anything from contempt to indifference. These may be the same cartoons which those same cognoscenti pore over and roar over in The New Yorker. “The Men Will Fear You, and the Women Will Adore You” by cartoonist William Hamilton...

“Big Jim” Folsom (1908- ), governor of Alabama (1946-1950, 1954-1958), was said to have entered office on a collision course with the state’s two major economic estates, big business and big agriculture. The 20-county Black Belt (a name derived from its soil, but equally descriptive of population composition) traverses the state just south of center....

“Livin’ is like pourin’ water out of a tumbler into a dang Coca-Cola bottle. If’n you skeered you cain’t do it, you cain’t. If’n you say to yoreself, ‘By dang, I can do it!’ then, by dang, you won’t slosh a drop.” This sample of dialogue conveys something of the tone, language, and philosophy of...

In the New College at Edinburgh in 1934, young divinity students stimulated themselves by turning over old and new ideas: Calvinism, Barthianism, the role of the body of Christ in the world, the form of the liturgy, the purpose of missions—in other words, the same issues that, mutatis mutandis, have sparked theological discussions since the...

Psychotherapy is big business. America employs perhaps a half million professionals and paraprofessionals (psycho therapists, psychiatric technicians, drug/alcohol counselors, clinical social workers, clinical psychologists, psychiatrists and psychiatric nurses, family therapists) in the field, and the talk therapy industry as a whole is worth about $17 billion. Yet many scholars and laymen are uneasy at the...

Some novels tell a story that causes us to see reality in a new way. Other novels are manufactured around a message. The Set-Up is of this second type. Volkoff wants to teach us that the Soviets plan long term, that they are clever at masking their intentions, and that they have committed their re...

Do you remember Hrotsvit (Roswitha) of Gandersheim, mentioned in the survey of world literature that you took as an undergraduate? “The first female German poet, the first dramatist of Germany, the first person in Germany to employ the Faust theme, etc.”—but who cared? Because Hrotsvit, the canoness of the Imperial Abbey of Gandersheim, wrote her...

“I should have availed myself of waggery, had not malice been multitudinous.” —Christopher Smart The English are known for their love of the eccentric. Batty dons, hapless clerics, Colonel Blimps, imperious aunts, and addled aristocrats are scattered over the landscape of the English popular imagination. In a society where a high value is placed on...

Near the end of this fine book, John Aldridge observes: “The history of the period from 1890, roughly, to 1940 might . . . have been the history of the disappearance of the novel as an art form in society. . . . Yet there has seldom if ever been a time when more novels...