Category: Reviews

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...

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,...

“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...

“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...

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...

The 25 short essays on a variety of “Christian classics” collected in this book originally appeared in the Neiv Oxford Review between November 1979 and October 1982. Collected here, in their total economy, James J. Thompson’s essays remind us of the maturing legitimacy of the interdisciplinarv relations between literature and religion. Christian Classics Revisited shows...

Is it possible for the traditional conservative concern with virtue and the good society to be reconciled with the libertarian emphasis on individual freedom? Should libertarianism be considered part of conservatism, or is it an alien presence? These are some of the crucial questions editor George W. Carey and a variety of conservative and libertarian...

The relationship between culture and history, structure and event is one of those questions to which every school of social science has an answer. Marshall Sahlins belongs to that vanishing species: the historically minded anthropologist. Like his mentor, Leslie White, and his colleague, Elman Service, Sahlins has dedicated much of his career to discovering the...

Mingei: Japanese Folk Art, an exhibition consisting of 115 paintings, sculptures, ceramics, furniture, lacquers, toys, and other artifacts, opened at the Brooklyn Museum on July 12 and remained on display through September 30, 1985. Most of the art of Japan is imbued with simplicity, directness, and a tremendous sense of design. Japanese work in the...

Originally published in 1963 by the Ohio State University Press, Ohio Town quickly drew a near-cult following that Harper & Row would now evidently like to amplify in the wake of Santmyer’s best selling ” . . . And Ladies of the Club.” This personal diary of a small, Midwestern town’s evolution can be best...

Christa Wolf is an East German novelist who delivered several lectures at the West German University of Frankfurt on a work-in-progress focusing on the Trojan seeress, Cassandra. Cassandra survived the sack of Troy to be taken back to Greece by Agamemnon, only to be slain with him by his wife, Clytemnestra. Her novella on this...

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,...

Christian moral thinking has always had to harmonize with New Testament texts such as “the love of money is the root of all evils,” and “blessed are the poor.” At the same time. Christian morality is incompatible with the kind of spirituality that decries the material world and all that pertains to it as either...

Walter Burkert may be the world’s leading authority on the religion of the ancient Greeks. Like several predecessors in the field—notably Friedrich Nietzsche and Walter Otto—Burkert writes almost as an enthusiast. In a series of important works, he has paid the Greeks the very high courtesy of taking them seriously. Burkert is a sort of...

The reader knows from the outset of Miss Read’s 30th anachronistic novel of village gossip that the “affairs” at Thrush Green are not of the illicit variety. This latest amble into the not-so-lively lives of the middle-aged people last encountered in Read’s Gossip Prom Thrush Green (1981) presents a world dominated by old-fashioned simplicity and...

Rarely has any important figure in the history of Christianity been as ignorant of theology as Martin Niemöller. Even his friend and political ally Karl Earth commented on the fact. It was Niemöller’s single-minded courage and patriotism that made him important. In the Great War he was a U-boat commander. Disgusted with what he viewed...

A comic religious novel, North Gladiola treats the same region of southeast Louisiana and some of the same characters that James Wilcox introduced to his readers in his first novel, Modern Baptists (Doubleday, 1983). The protagonist of the first novel, bumbling Mr. Pickens, plays a minor role in the second, as do meddling Donna Lee...

It need hardly be said again that Laszlo Moholy-Nagy was one of Modernism’s primary figures, whose art, writing, and life remain for many a continuing inspiration. He was a polyartist, a true polyartist, who made consequential contributions to the traditions of several nonadjacent arts—painting, book design, artistic machinery, and photography—amidst lesser achievements in film, theater...

For some time now, many have accepted the logic of nuclear defense. The strategic and moral superiority of a system that relies on killing weapons instead of people seems—on the face of it—undeniable. By suggesting we build such a defense. President Reagan altered the nuclear calculus in which our civilian population is currently held hostage...

Reconstructing the Bostonians A popular film that is more than chewing gum for the mind is a rare treat, and a novel of power and poignancy, translated into a well-created film, is sheer bliss. The Bostonians is a love story about an archaic Southern man who falls in love with a beautiful feminist preacher who...

Lord Louis Mountbatten died in 1979, a victim of IRA assassins. Since then, no fewer than three biographies on the man have appeared (if one includes The Life and Times of Lord Mountbatten, the book on Mountbatten’s self-orchestrated television documentary, shown in this country as Mountbatten: A Man for the Century). The latest, by Philip...

The most widely known of these three novelists is Romain Gary, who committed suicide in 1980 at the age of 66, perhaps as a result of his disastrous marriage to the American actress and radical, Jean Seaberg, who had taken her own life a year earlier. A Lithuanian emigrant to France, where he played a...

“It is much the point of Judaism that efforts to waken the consciences of others should not prevent Jews from reexamining their own.” So writes Stephen Whitfield, a professor of American studies at Brandeis, in this new study of 20th-century American Jewry. The means Jews have frequently used to arouse and examine the conscience have...

Human beings are alternately ashamed and amused by the spectacle of their closest connections on the scala naturae. Behavior that we find unremarkable in dogs and cats—sexual promiscuity or self-abuse—seems grotesque in chimpanzees and baboons. Looking at apes and monkeys in the zoo is a little too much like looking at ourselves in a fun-house...

In America, speaking out against work was once like saying nasty things about motherhood. Even now that attacks on motherhood have become common. Perry Pascarella makes it clear in The New Achievers that work is still sacred to the yuppie mentality. No longer, however, is work the spiritual exercise it was in Calvinism; restraining the...

Iain Banks’s first novel invites comparison with the work of Ian McEwan. During the mid-1970’s, McEwan began to establish himself as one of Britain’s most successful writers of fiction. First Love, Last Rites—his first collection of short stories—sold unusually well and won the prestigious Somerset Maugham Award. The Cement Garden, his first novel, was widely...

The title of this book is misleading. Karen Gerard’s subject is one city. New York, and the “scenes” she discusses are random sketches of New York’s political, economic, and cultural life. Gerard, former deputy mayor of New York under Edward Koch, writes like a politician: her style is largely anecdotal, and the book meanders tourist-like...

Perhaps it is inevitable that the new Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and his wife Raisa (already dubbed the “Bo Derek of the Steppes” in a British press report) will come to the United States. If Secretary Gorbachev does visit, the journalists and commentators who report the visit should be required to read The Brezhnev Politburo...

“Some races increase, others are reduced, and in a short while the generations of living creatures are changed and like runners relay the torch of life.” —Lucretius Reading student applications for scholarships, as I have done on and off now for a dozen years on the undergraduate scholarships committee of the University of California, Davis,...