Category: Reviews

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,...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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. . . ....

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...

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...

“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...

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...

“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...

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...

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...

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...

It is tempting to say that Mary Bringle’s Hacks at Lunch was written by a hack—at lunch or otherwise engaged. But so laconic a pronouncement would leave the reviewer open to charges of disingenuousness and flippancy; and, since some such judgment cannot be substantively avoided, it must be elucidated and qualified. The premise of this...

Sol M. Linowitz’s autobiography tells once again the classic story of the successful American. Son of a middle-class Jewish wholesale fruit dealer from New Jersey who was impoverished by the Great Depression, Linowitz attended Hamilton College on a partial scholarship, financing the rest of his education by waiting on tables, working in the college library,...

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...

“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...

“The more I began to think about and read Coward, the more convinced I became that the history of British entertainment in the first half of this century was essentially the history of his own career.” With that observation, Sheridan Morley, drama critic and arts editor of Punch, begins his biography of Noel Coward. The...

Controversy and intense media scrutiny marked Dee Jepsen’s 14 months as President Reagan’s Special Assistant for Public Liaison to women’s organizations, until she resigned in October 1983 to work for the unsuccessful reelection campaign of her husband. Senator Roger Jepsen of Iowa. President Reagan’s extemporaneous remark that “if it weren’t for women, men would still...

At last there is a scientific work that justifies the term natural philosophy. In every discipline there should eventually come a time when it is possible to repeat the words of a great historic occasion in America: the man and the hour are met. Such events are increasingly rare in the sciences, where specialization and...

“Every artist,” wrote V.I. Lenin, “everyone who considers himself as such, has the right to create freely according to his ideals, independently of everything.” Who would have guessed that the author of this noble thought is none other than the originator of one of the world’s most repressive social systems! Even the most remote similarity...

In his State of the Union address of January 6, 1945, Franklin Roosevelt looked to the future with confidence: “The new year of 1945 can be the greatest year of achievement in human history,” he declared. “Nineteen forty-five can and must see the substantial beginning of the Organization of World Peace. This Organization must be...

When historians draw up their lists of ruthless autocrats, Ivan the Terrible is usually near the top. When political scientists assert that totalitarianism is not a new phenomenon, they back up their claim with a reference to Ivan the Terrible, the 16th-century leader of Russia who dominated both church and state. This first Czar of...

“Where so’er I turn my view All is strange, yet nothing new; Endless labour all along, Endless labour to be wrong.” —Samuel Johnson Epicurus had an answer for everything. The universe consisted of nothing except atoms and void; the qualities of matter and of our sensory experience—hardness, color, heaviness, etc.—were determined completely by the size,...

Originally published in Catalan in 1490 and now newly translated by David H, Rosenthal, Tirant Lo Blanc is a prose masterpiece written by the Valencian nobleman Joanot Martorell and completed by Marti Joan de Galba after Martorell’s death. Written when the Catalan influence in Sicily, Rhodes, and other parts of the Mediterranean was still significant,...

Jeremy Rifkin declares himself a heretic in this book, but he is more accurately described as a Cassandra and not a Huss or a Bruno. This “new age” doomsayer feels romantic impulses and expresses them with poetic skill, but his limited grasp of history, his absurd economic proposals, and his skewed philosophical perspective still show...

Winner of France’s Renaudot Prize, this autobiographical Bildungsroman is a first-person narrative of a young man from a Belgian village who begins as a seminarian and ends as a disillusioned anarchist. Under the direction of his widowed mother and the village priest, he enters the seminary in Louvain, where his study of the changing values...

“Poetry,” declared T.S. Eliot, “is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not an expression of personality, but an escape from personality.” More than one set of eyebrows has arched at that pronouncement. For surely we read in part to know the man behind the work. A blind bard,...