Not a Prayer by Steven Hayward Horst E. Richter: All Mighty: A Study of the God Complex in Western Man; Harvest House Publishers; Claremont, CA. There are several ways of thinking about what has come to be called “the decline of the West.” There are the rather sweeping generalizations about secularism by evangelical theologian...
Category: Reviews
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Commendables
Thinking Clearly About War by Gary Jason James Turner Johnson: Can Modern War Be Just?; Yale University Press; New Haven. There is nothing quite so fatuous as the nuclear pacifism currently fashionable among leftist theologians and their ilk. Visions of mushroom clouds (brought on by repeated viewings of On the Beach and Dr. Strangelove)...
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Breast-Beating and Myth-Exploding
The wavering course of United States foreign policy and our fumbling initiatives in the world’s trouble spots have turned a brighter spotlight upon governmental decision-making in this vital area. Our performances in Iran, Lebanon, and Nicaragua have raised questions about the capacity of our open government to deal with these recurring problems. And neither our...
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Criminal Commonplaces
Back in 1969 the Violence Commission issued a report which foresaw the urban America of the future as a sort of terrorist Alphaville: high-tech business centers and shopping malls protected by armed guards, fortified apartment complexes defended by sophisticated electronic surveillance, and patrols of armed citizens keeping a vigilant watch over their neighborhoods. As Elliot...
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Twentieth Century Fox
Every century must appear to those who live through it as the most important in history. In the case of the 20th century, an argument can be made that it represents a turning point comparable to the great transitional periods of human history and that, unlike these other periods, it affects directly and immediately most...
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Church +/- State (Part 1)
In writing The Naked Public Square, Richard John Neuhaus, a Lutheran pastor, was undoubtedly conscious of Lutheranism’s potentially central role in mediating the religious-moral battles now so conspicuous on the American scene. Liturgical and dogmatic, yet firmly evangelical, mainstream in some of its American manifestations and quasi-sectarian in others, running the gamut from the most sophisticated theology...
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Church +/- State (Part 2)
My hometown in central Pennsylvania has long had a naked public square. Today the most noteworthy buildings on the square are the Colonial Bar and Grill, a Seven Eleven, and a barbershop. Religion is nowhere to be seen. I am not, I must confess, embarrassed about this, except aesthetically. It reflects a tradition going back...
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Commendables
Holy Water for the Rich Bernard Murchland: The Dream of Christian Socialis,; American Enterprise Institute; Washington, D.C. Christianity and socialism exert tremendous influence in our world. Not surprisingly, some people have sought to harness these powerful forces together in one unified engine of change. Today, we hear talk of a “Christian social conscience” and “liberation theology.” Bernard...
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In Focus
A Tale of Modern Times William Dear: The Dungeon Master: The Disappearance of James Dallas Egbert III; Houghton Mufflin; Boston. Dallas Egbert was a genius. At the age of 13 he entered Michigan State University to study computer science. MSU assured the Egberts that the university would take special care of the brilliant but remarkably...
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Reconstructing the Bostonians
The Bostonians: Directed by James Ivory; Screenplay by Ruth Prawer Ghabvala; Merchant-Ivory Production. 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...
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Filming for Dollars
Zanuck: The Rise and Fall of Hollywood’s Last Tycoon by Leonard Mosley; Little Brown, Boston. Movies have not always been taken seriously as art. When Rudolph Arnheim 50 years ago compared film with painting, music, and literature, he was being deliberately controversial. It was a long road from the nickelodeon to artistic respectability. Today film...
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Nest of Vipers
Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre by Simone de Beauvoir; Pantheon, New York. It may hurt, but it is useful to know that in matters of foreign translations available at our publishers and bookstores, we live in a well-guarded ghetto. There are protective turrets in the ghetto’s wall, called Sartre, Beauvoir, Gunter Grass, Hein rich B6ll,...
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Beyond the Norm and Back
Heretics of Dune by Frank Herbert; G.P. Putman’s Sons, New York. While waiting for the cinematic spectacle of Dune, we decided that a bit of exploratory work was in order, so we attended to Frank Herbert’s world –– nay, universes –– of Dune. That was no small feat, as it is a trek into Dune,...
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Old Answers to Old Questions
After a decade or two of introspective breast-beating, educators are turning from an examination of what is wrong with public schooling to what is right with private schooling. This latest entry to the field examines religious education in the United States. Nearly 5.1 million students attend some sort of private school (K-12), eschewing for whatever...
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Screen
Seeing Red Red Dawn; Directed by John Milius; Written by John Milius and Kevin Reynolds; MGM-UA Entertainment. by C. P. Dragash There is a common daydream among men who grew up in the years between the Berlin blockade and the Cuban missile crisis: the Russians have invaded the American heartland, and a...
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Perceptibles
Howard Thurman: For the Inward Journey; Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; San Diego. During his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, Jesse Jackson was widely praised for using the language of black evangelism. Wiser observers recognized that Jackson had actually degraded his inherited religious vocabulary by cutting it loose from its spiritual roots and putting it...
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Waste of Money
Media MIA’s Vietnam Reconsidered: Lessons from a War;Edited by Harrison E. Salisbury; Harper & Row; New York. James Dunkerley: The Long War, Dictatorship and Revou1tion in El Salvador;Junction; London. It has been a decade since America withdrew its troops from Vietnam. Unfortunately, scores of servicemen remain officially unaccounted for, their fate shrouded...
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Notables
Pure Drivel The feminist movement has fallen on hard times. Many of the intellectual leaders of the movement are abandoning the battlefield and withdrawing to the snug fastnesses of fantasy and self-gratification. Some dream of once and future Amazonian kingdoms ruled by women. Others plan to engineer their androgynous land of heart’s desire with...
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Commendables
A Dangerous Classic Richard M. Weaver: Ideas Have Consequences; University of Chicago; Chicago and London. Richard Weaver was among the rarest of rare birds: an American political philosopher. His intellectual roots reach back through the Nashville Agrarians (Donald Davidson, especially) to Calhoun and ultimately to Thomas and Aristotle. A professed enemy of the...
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In Focus
Journey to Nowhere Lesley Blanch: Pierre Loti: The Legendary Romantic; Helen and Kurt Wolff Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; San Diego. In the end, nothing is more boring than adventure. Once the newness has worn off, foreign landscapes, forbidden loves, and bizarre rituals prove less stimulating than familiar settings, ordinary people, and well-worn traditions. This...
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In Focus
Of Careers, Criminals, and Creative Writers Theodore Dreiser: An Amateur Laborer; University of Pennsylvania Press; Philadelphia. Nelson Algren: The Devil’s Stocking;Arbor House; New York. By the time the average American child has reached adolescence, he has been asked hundreds of times by solicitous relatives and politely curious strangers, “What are you going to be when...
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Commendables
Of Isms and Idolatry The Economic System of Free Enterprise: Its Judeo-Christian Values and Philosophical Concepts; Edited by Paul C. Goelz; St. Mary’s University Press; San Antonio, TX. During their relatively short but incredibly bloody existence as a world historical force, Marxists have murdered millions of men, women, and children, largely without regret. Many Marxists, however,...
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What Price Integrity?
Seth Cagin and Philip Dray: Hollywood Films of the Seventies: Sex, Drugs, Violence, Rock ‘n’ Roll, and Politics; Harper & Row; New York. One of the big blows to the underground press in America in the 1960’s was an ad campaign staged by a major record company that used such toy-gun revolutionary slogans as “The...
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Art
Fluff John Bernard Myers: Tracking the Marvelous: A Life in the New York Art World; Random House, New York. Books — paper ones, not those cassettes that are now hanging on racks in bookstores for the busy executives who would like to listen to a paragraph or two while not making deals on their cars’...
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Notables
Building It’s always with pleasure that we come upon a volume by Saul Bellow, for he is a writer with talent and, more importantly, vision, a man who can meld the quotidian and the profound into a unified, intellectually compelling narrative. With the case of Him With His Foot in His Mouth and Other Stories...
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Screen: Zoology
Screen Zoology Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes; Directed by Hugh Hudson; Screenplay by P. H. Vazak and Michael Austin, based on Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Buroughs; Warner Brothers. Greystoke raises a large number of questions, most of which will not be addressed here. For example, there’s the question...
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Commendables
Be True to Your School Ernest L. Boyer, High School, A Report on Secondary Education in America; Harper & Row; New York. by Carlisle G. Packard In 1955, two-thirds of Americans asked by a Gallup poll indicated that they would be willing to pay more taxes if the increase were applied to raising teachers’ salaries. In...
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Screen
Slime After Slime Star 80; Written and Directed by Bob Fosse; Ladd Company/Warner Brothers. by Stephen Macaulay An ad for Star 80 claims that it is considered “One of the Year’s [1983] Ten Best” by a number of people who should know; lest anyone have doubts, the claimants are listed. One man, apparently, just couldn’t...
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In Focus
Aloof and Awry George H. Douglas: Edmund Wilson’s America; The University Press of Kentucky; Lexington, KY. Henry David Thoreau went to Walden Pond, so he told the world, to get away from people. But the reader of Walden may wonder with James Russell Lowell if Thoreau is not just a poseur who actually wants “a...
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Perceptibles
I. Grekova: Russian Women: Two Stories;Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich; New York. Judy Blume: Smart Women; G. P. Putnam’s Sons; New York. During the “sexual revolution” in Russia in the l920’s, writer Alexandra Kollontai acquired notoriety for her “glass of water” theory, according to which “love was but [a] sexual urge akin to thirst, with the quenching...
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Waste of Money
Spent Fireworks Allen Wier: Departing as Air; Simon & Schuster; New York. by Dennis R. Perry Critic Allen Tate once commented that the epic could not be written in a society without common values. Allen Wier’s Departing as Air unfortunately—and unintentionally—reminds us that if there is a basis for fiction in our society, it is based...
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Screen
Return to Remedial Physics Silkwood; Directed by Mike Nichols; Written by Nora Ephron and Alice Arlen; ABC Motion Pictures/Twentieth Century Fox. One of the latest causes of self-righteousness, posturing, and enlightened indignation is not a person or place, but a thing: a group of heavy metals that disintegrate and emit various rays (alpha, beta, gamma),...
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Waste of Money
More Equal Than Thou Judith A. Baer: Equality Under the Constitution: Reclaiming the Fourteenth Amendment; Cornell University Press; Ithaca, NY. Among the amendments to the Constitution, none were ever more morally justified nor more desperately needed than the three which abolished slavery and gave blacks the rights of citizenship and of equal protection under...
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In Focus
Signals of Strength Charlie A. Beckwith and Donald Knox: Delta Force; Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; San Diego. This warrior’s account will leave its mark above all as hero saga in a land by no means lacking in heroes but oblivious and often antagonistic to their deeds. Nor will it be forgotten as testimony in a vituperative...
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Past & Presence
Rumble Fish; Directed by Francis Ford Coppola; Written by Francis Ford Coppola and S. E. Hinton; Based on a novel by S. E. Hinton; Universal. An individual is the sum of his memories and his dreams. That, of course, is no great revelation; the Greeks were scripting plays about it thousands of years ago. Nowadays,...
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Factualism
Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film by Erik Barnouw; Oxford University Press; New York. Cinema in our society serves, for the most part, to entertain. This is not to deny the existence of training films—educational tools, which are served by a sizable industry—but to take note of the fact that the cinema is almost...
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Waste of Money
An Empty Shell Game A.P. Foulkes: Literature and Propaganda; Methuen; New York. The cover of Literature and Propaganda, the proverbial warning notwithstanding is very telling about the book’s contents and about how perverse the image of America is in the offices of Methuen. Indeed, the cover makes an impression with such a magnitude of force...
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Art
Léger Peter de Francia: Fernand Léger; Yale University Press; New Haven, CT. During the fabulous, legendary, supreme outburst of artistic creativity that occurred during the first three decades of this century, concentrated in Europe between Vitebsk and Pyrenees and called “avant-garde” (or the School of Paris, modern abstraction, fauvism, cubism, futurism, expressionism, constructionism, suprematism, surrealism,...
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Music
Recycling Jim Morrison is dead and buried and thriving in Paris. That is a fact, not the name of a new bit for the dinner theater circuit. Morrison — the rock singer who had his loins between his ears and pretentions of being a filmmaker (Pauline Kael admired him) and a poet (a sort of...
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Commendables
Original Thought & Triplicate Forms George Roche: America by the Throat: the Stranglehold of Federal Bureaucracy; Devin-Adair; Old Grennwich, CT. Edwin J. Feulner, Jr: Conservatives Stalk the House: the Republican Study Committee 1970-1982; Green Hill; Ottawa, IL. Conservatives come in at least two types: those who wish to conserve principles and those who wish to...
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In Focus
Simpering for the Soviets Derek Lambert: The Red Dove; Stein and Day; New York. Anthony Olcott: May Day in Magadan; Bantam Books; New York. At a recent professional conference I had an informal discussion about world affairs with an editor of a metalworking trade journal. A constant concern in that industry, as in automotive, is...
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Perceptibles
Hugh Bayless: The Best Towns in America; Houghton Mifflin; Boston. A semanticist would have a field day with the title affixed to Mr. Bayless’s efforts. The word “best” is one of the most subjective in the English language. And “town”: What, exactly, are the definitive differences between town, village, municipality, city? (Hint: It isn’t size;...