Category: Reviews

In 1979 Norman Mailer won the Pulitzer Prize and earned a small fortune with his sympathetic portrayal of murderer Gary Gilmore. Entitled The Executioner’s Song, Mailer’s book devoted 1,050 pages to the last days of the two-time murderer, and only 18 pages to the victims. A year later, 22-year-old Eric Kaminsky, a promising young musician,...

American diplomats, foreign policy experts, and politicians desperately want to believe that the Soviet leaders are essentially like us and that, fundamentally, they want the same things as we do. The Soviets encourage this kind of thinking with their proposals for disarmament, trade, and detente, and with their laments over the madness of the current...

Among Wyndham Lewis’ nearly 50 books are found such classics as Time and Western Man (1927) and the novels Tarr (1918), The Apes of God (1930), and The Revenge For Love (1937). But at the time of his death in 1957, Lewis was probably better known for his persona than for his writings or the...

Dramatic conversions happen. F.F. Bruce, the noted New Testament scholar, is not alone in insisting that no one can understand Paul of Tarsus without considering his experience on the road to Damascus. And whether you believe, as Christians do, that he there met the resurrected Christ or not, all admit that he was not the...

“In the end I shall have to renounce optimism.” —Voltaire Among other, more profound things, Dostoevski’s anti-revolutionary novel, The Possessed, is a withering dissection of liberal intellectuals. In its pages, liberals parade as hostile and irresponsible critics of a society that affords most of them a life of comfort and status. They are the “fathers”...

Author of one previous history of the American West, Richard Batman has attempted in The Outer Coast to provide a history of foreigners in California from the founding of the first mission in 1769 until the attempted annexation of Monterey by a drunken American Navy captain in 1842, which, in Batman’s eyes, marked the end...

Jacques Derrida has in recent years made himself one of the most influential figures in literary criticism on American college campuses. The movement he has inspired, alternately known as “deconstruction” or “poststructuralism,” asserts that all language is metaphorical and that there is nothing outside the literary text. Following Derrida’s lead, Joseph G. Kronick challenges the...

Some years ago Ernest Tuveson argued in his landmark study Redeemer Nation that our country’s Puritan background has led it through a series of historical crusades—from Indian wars to Vietnam—to bring righteousness to a corrupt world. It’s an interesting idea, disturbing and perhaps perverse, that deserves more attention than it has gotten. Tuveson’s study leads...

The Soviet Union has reached the peak of its military power by reducing its economy to a shambles. If it continues to lavish its resources on the military, the economy will further decline, eventually imperiling the military budget. If the Soviets shift investment to the civilian economy, less money will remain for guns. If the...

Many see in Kurt Vonnegut a menace to society. Since the late 1960’s, parents’ groups and school boards in several states have launched drives to keep Slaughterhouse Five and other Vonnegut novels out of libraries and off syllabi. Other observers regard Kurt Vonnegut as a writer of consistent intelligence and integrity—a titan of his age....

Eugene O’Neill’s life was a purgatory, as he never ceased informing us. His final plays, those written or revised from 1939 on, leave us with a vision of him plodding at last toward the top of that inverted mountain, the man emerging from his lifelong torments and the artist from his befuddlements. O’Neill is unique...

In graceful prose not unworthy of his subject, the distinguished English biographer Lord David Cecil paints an endearing portrait of “St. Charles,” as Thackeray was later to call Lamb. Saint he was, certainly, and sinner, too. The death of Lamb’s mother at the hands of his intermittently mad sister, Mary, caused him lasting grief and...

He wrote one of the most distinctive and original prose styles of his time, paralleling the techniques of his Yankee contemporary, Henry James, anticipating those of Pound and Eliot. But he used that style to write Greek grammars and commentaries on obscure Greek and Latin poets and page after page of “brief mentions,” mini-reviews, of...

There used to be two Daniel P. Moynihans. One wrote interesting essays on the foibles and pitfalls of crafting public policy. While seldom mistaken for a rigorous social scientist, this Moynihan had a gift for translating the esoteric findings of the research sociologists into the vernacular. He saw through the pretentions of political hubris and...

Nietzsche’s comment that “the enemy of truth is not lies but convictions” comes to mind while reading An Environmental Agenda for the Future, a collection of statements by leaders of major environmental organizers. In a book of scatter-shot propositions, a few hits are inevitable: the contributors are surely right to criticize misuse of resources and...

Alberto Giacometti was almost a living caricature of The Modern Artist. Such a judgment would strike his biographer as unfair, but it cannot be helped. The popular mind has formed some definite ideas about how an artist behaves: he is above all shabby—wearing clothes he might have slept in, spattered with paint (or caked with...

Most parents, especially those with teenagers, know the increasing costs of having children, but in Pricing the Priceless Child, Viviana Zelizer investigates the declining economic value of American children during the past century. Zelizer charts this decline from 1870-1930, noting the simultaneous increase in the sentimental value of children. She notes that, starting in 1860,...

American novelists no longer write about America. That, at least, was the judgment of many foreign writers who attended the recent PEN Conference. It would be hard to make the same complaint about our poets. In fact, it is hard to escape the feeling that a good many American poets are engaged in an exploration,...

The origin and nature of the state has been at the heart of political theory from the time of Plato and Aristotle. While speculations about man’s primal innocence in a state of nature cannot be taken seriously as science, they continue to influence political propaganda. Liberal philosophers like Rawls and Nozick continue to write about...

Feng Jicai’s volume of short stories is truly a remarkable work. It is one of the first publications by a writer in the People’s Republic of China in which the writer has allowed people to be people. The reader does not find the stereotypical characters of proletarian literature in Feng’s stories; instead, these tales are...

Fyodor Dostoevsky is among the pioneers of modern literature. However, like so many of the pioneers—particularly T.S. Eliot—he is acknowledged with ambivalence and even reluctance. Like The Waste Land, Dostoevsky’s works are prized for their subtle exploration of modern despair and alienation. Like Eliot, Dostoevsky is celebrated as a daring technical innovator and a superb...

Richard McKenzie, a member of the economics department of Clemson University, here assesses the probable impact of new government regulation of the economy under what politicians like to call “National Industrial Policy” (NIP). He sets forth the major legislative policy proposals promoted under this rubric, and he examines their probable effect upon international trade, capital...

Unlike the world of democratic politics with its ever-present television cameras and investigative reporters, the world of communism is a realm of mysteries and shadows, understood by few who do not actually hold power. Richard Staar and the 79 regional specialists who have contributed to this encyclopedic volume have performed an invaluable public service by...

It is impossible to read Gorham Munson’s The Awakening Twenties without thinking of Malcolm Cowley’s Exile’s Return, since both are memoir-histories of the 20’s. Munson, however, is concerned only with 1913-1924. “America will never be the same.” So opined the New York Globe after the official opening of the 1913 Armory Show. . . ....

Tuska’s thesis is that Westerns are not attempts to portray the old West with documentary fidelity, nor do they merely reflect the attitudes of the American public. They are the creation of directors and producers, great and insignificant, men indifferent to historical accuracy and full of their own insights and biases. Furthermore, these insights and...

As tales of child abuse are screamed out on the nightly news, pressures mount for a national policy. Adolescent children are taken away from parents who appear “too strict,” and state after state have passed laws on child abuse that include vague provisions for “mental health.” Parents are beginning to wonder exactly where they stand....

The New Republic claims with some pride to be schizophrenic: it infuriates both the right and the left, while claiming subscribers from the elite of both wings. It has published one of the most damning articles yet on the Sandinista government, while likewise exposing the atrocities of the Contras. And what other magazine offers both...

“May not a man have several voices . . . as well as two complexions?” —Nathaniel Hawthorne In George Garrett’s stories the conflict often arises between a wild lone Outsider and a generally conscientious but insecure Establishment figure; in Peter Taylor’s stories the conflict is likely to take place between generations, the revolt of the...

“As long as virtue was dominant in the republic so long was the happiness of the people secure.” —Robert E. Lee John P. Diggins raises various, often profound, questions about the moral foundations of America as a political society. Diggins is fond of calling attention to what he considers the underlying cultural tensions in American...

“It is better that some should be unhappy, than that none should be happy, which would be the case in a general state of equality.” —Samuel Johnson The best way to corrupt a value is to maximize it. That is one of the fundamental lessons of liberalism in the postwar period. Take rights. Push one...

“The bookful blockhead . . . [w]ith his own tongue still edifies his ears, / And always listening to himself appears.” —Alexander Pope Behind Stephen Berg’s Singular Voices, a new anthology of contemporary native poets writing about their own work, is the voice-theory of poetry, which holds that a poet is valuable not for his...

Robert Ruark has nothing on Otto Scott for ability to provide simultaneous political commentary and African travelogue. A careful historian and shrewd observer with the ability to set forth his observations with apt parsimony, Scott has written a book eclectic in sweep, including incisive commentary on the state of Western morality, media and culture, and...

This is the kind of novel that inspires slick reviewers and writers of publisher’s blurbs to new outrages in inflated but tacky description: “lusty,” “brawling,” “pulsing with ambition,” “passion and greed,” “an epic saga.” The story begins in Mexico in 1927, with flashbacks going back to the turn of the century, and ends in 1982....

“It came burning hot into my mind, whatever he said and however he Battered, when he got me to his house, he would sell me for a slave.” —John Bunyan Kenneth Minogue explains at the outset that he prefers a narrow definition of “ideology”: the word refers not to all action-oriented systems of belief but...

From August 1941 until November 1943, George Orwell served as the producer and writer of a radio talk show beamed by the BBC out to India. Physically unfit for army duty, he considered the job to be his way of “doing his bit” in the war against Hitler. The image of Orwell as a chief...

As Israel becomes increasingly important in world affairs, Jews and non-Jews alike increasingly want to understand the origins of the Israeli state and of the Zionist movement. This is volume one of the first scholarly biography of Chaim Weizmann. It provides a thoroughly researched account of how a Russian Jew from the Pale of Settlement...

An afternoon’s reading of Bolo’Bolo by “P.M.” leaves the reader wondering what the New York State Council on the Arts is doing giving public money to Columbia University to publish such books. A futuristic Utopian tract, Bolo’Bolo is as inane as it is self-indulgent. Its author, P.M., a slave to every cliche of the untutored...

Iconoclasm is the poor man’s intellectualism. Challenge a traditional way of thinking and you can vault yourself instantly into the celebrity spotlight, with lucrative publishing deals, testimonies before congressional committees, and interviews on Good Morning America. Since the 1960’s the iconoclasts have held sway in the study of criminal behavior, ignoring important studies done in...