Category: Vital Signs

The fame of Italian writer Eugenio Corti hinges on two works: I piu non ritornano: Diario di ventotto giorni in una sacca sul fronte russo, inverno 1942-43 (Most Do Not Return: Diary of Twenty Days in a Pocket on the Russian Front, Winter 1942-43) first published in 1947, and his great 1,280-page novel Il Cavallo...

There is little question or doubt in the public mind about the value of the homeschool. Homeschooled kids better behaved than children from public schools. homeschooled youngsters seldom become involved in gangs, seldom use drugs to excess, and there are absolutely no reports of a homeschooled teenager committing suicide (contrasted with the several thousand public schooled...

My ten years of research have finally paid off. My article in the February 1991 Chronicles, “In Loco Parentis: The Brave New Family in Missouri,” has led to nationwide opposition to the Parents as Teachers (PAT) program that began here in Missouri. As a result of this article, I have been over whelmed with hundreds of...

What we have here—not even the President has had the effrontery to deny it—is an intellectual recession. I cannot think of a year in which more; bad books received more serious attention. These weren’t just lapses but a pattern, and one need not be paranoid to look for explanations. What people do is, mostly, what...

The following was presented in acceptance of the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature, presented at Longwood College, Farmville, Virginia, September 20, 1991. The Dos Passos Prize is awarded to a writer in mid-career for a distinguished body of work; previous recipients include Graham Greene, Paule Marshall, Robert Stone, and Tom Wolfe. * * *...

Can it be that a fraud has been perpetrated on the readers and admirers of novelist-philosopher Ayn Rand—a literary and intellectual swindle that veers perilously close to plagiarism? That such a charge could be leveled at the author of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged is irony bordering on farce. For the spirit that animated the...

As I have previously observed in these pages, each of the ratification conventions with which the people of the 13 original states passed judgment on the handiwork of the Great Convention had its own distinctive drama— structural characteristics which in the end colored the meaning of the Constitution in the communities by which it was...

Bugsy Produced by Mark Johnson Written by James Toback Directed by Barry Levinson Released by Tri-Star Pictures Meeting Venus Produced by David Puttnam Written by István Szabó and Michael Hirst Directed by István Szabó Released by Warner Brothers Gangster movies show us an are, the parabolic rise and fall of a career where ambition comes...

In the spring of 1981, conservative Republicans in the House of Representatives cried. They cried because, in the first flush of the Reagan Revolution that was supposed to bring drastic cuts in taxes and government spending, as well as a balanced budget, they were being asked by the White House and their own leadership to...

San Francisco’s municipal palace looks like the Wicked Witch of the West might live there, only there aren’t any flying monkeys. But several years ago, the monkeys set up housekeeping right out front. Supplied with food, clothing, tents, and other amenities by “community activists,” hundreds of wild-eyed tramps extorted money from passersby, drank cheap wine,...

Any cogent discussion of crime must begin by casting aside the obfuscations of criminologists and social scientists who habitually lump together all types of crime. But while most people can be made to wax indignant against fraud or against such abstract “crimes” as insider trading, or even become outraged at employees taking pencils from their...

“Snap out of it, they’re only a pair of pants. . . . That’s what I keep telling myself. Actually, they’re a pair of linen pleated trousers I bought at Louis last spring. Little did I know what I was getting in for. The more I wear them, the more I love them, the more...

“Whew-whew! Whew-Whew!” I looked past my mother through the half open taxi window. An old man in a grey flecked, tweed jacket was walking a Scotch terrier on a leash. With much effort she cranked the window down another turn and stuck her head out. “Whew-whew!” she whistled again. The man turned, surprised, though not...

When an acquitted William Kennedy Smith emerged from the Florida courtroom last December declaring his faith in the system, a viewer could only query, “Why?” There stood a young man who was indicted for rape and forced to spend over one million dollars defending himself on the basis of the word of one person, the...

Absolute control of women over fertility has been the unparalleled dream of radical feminists for decades. Millions of women now view this aspiration as their sacrosanct right and have, with the advent of anti-fertility and other reproductive technologies, exercised this new right vigorously. This feminist dream, however, is fraught with irony. Many of the very...

The economy Soviet émigrés leave behind is property called irrational. Consider the economy they enter in the United States as described in an article that recently appeared in the Soviet paper the Independent. “The benefits (in America) are real. Our son attended an excellent private school for which he didn’t pay a cent. Then he...

A year after the nasty secret got out of how race-norming works on the nation’s most widely used job test, the establishment news herd suddenly discovered the story. There were spots on NBC Nightly News and the Today Show, a front-page story in the Washington Post, an editorial in the New York Times, and a...

Jack Kemp arrived in February 1989 at the dark halls of the Department or Housing and Urban Development (HUD). During the Energy Crisis, the lights had been dimmed to save electricity, but as secretary, Kemp ordered them turned up. With that action, he began a two-year spending spree which has transformed its colossal concrete headquarters...

Billy Bathgate Produced by Arlene Donovan and Robert F. Coplesberry Directed by Robert Benton Written by Tom Stoppard Based on the book by E.L. Doctorow Released by Buena Vista Pictures Advance word was that this film was troubled, which helps it, I think. With lowered expectations, one comes hoping only for an engaging Dustin Hoffman...

In recent years conservative thinkers and politicians in Britain and America have mounted a powerful critique of welfare statism and of the “dependency culture” that it creates. A similar though more radical critique of the nascent social state was made by a group of British dissident intellectuals before and after the First World War. It...

The Boy Scouts of America have recently been accused of sins against Democracy, in the form of discrimination against atheists, homosexuals, and women. Four recent lawsuits have challenged the organizational prerogatives of the Scouts. The families of nine-year-old twins Michael and William Randall of Anaheim, California, and eight-year-old Mark Welsh of Chicago are suing to...

In the summer of 1929, my aunt Zarita Nahon, a philologist and teacher of languages, traveled from Biarritz to Hendaye, en route to Tangier to collect the medieval Spanish balladry, lost in Spain but still extant in the coastal cities of Morocco, for the anthropologist Franz Boas. She was making a detour to visit Miguel...

To prepare couples for the sacrament and life of matrimony, Roman Catholic canon prescribes sensible requirements for “Pastoral Care and What Must Precede Celebration of Marriage.” According to Canon 1063, “Pastors of souls are obliged to see to it that their own ecclesiastical community furnishes the Christian faithful assistance so that the matrimonial state is...

It was 1936 and the Depression still held America in its grip. Few doubted that a new European war was coming, and Japan and China had been fighting in the East for years. Most Americans were opposed to participating in another futile European war. The President had begun his successful campaign for the White House...

The University of Wisconsin’s main campus in Madison has relished, at least since the anti-war movement of the 1960’s, its image as one of the most radical and leftist colleges in America. In order to cement that status well into the next century, the university is now selling and nationally distributing a package of “Health-Line”...

“Left! — — Left! — — Left! Right! Left!” The drill instructor inside of me had successfully surfaced and was now exulting in command. We were approaching the corner of the parade field, and I was getting ready for “To the left! ! March!” when it suddenly occurred to me that it might be amusing...

My Father’s Glory My Mother’s Castle Produced by Alain Poire Directed by Yves Robert Written by Lucette Andrei and Yves Robert Released by Orion Classics At a certain point, maybe two-thirds of the way through the pretentious nonsense of Barton Fink, I began to despair of finding anything interesting enough to write about, even in...

On September 25, 1789, Congress submitted to the states for ratification ten amendments to the 1787 Constitution, known as the Bill of Rights. Seldom is there much serious reflection on the issues involved in a “Bill of Rights,” but there was a great deal in 1787-1789. Those Americans were highly informed political thinkers, versed in...

The most important datum about Western fiction is that it is at the absolute bottom of the literary heap, somewhere below pornography. English professors would cavil at calling Westerns literature; they prefer to categorize Westerns as subliterature, or entertainment. Few, if any, educated people read Westerns. The higher the cultural and academic attainments of the...

“Let a philosophic observer commence a journey from the savages of the Rocky Mountains eastwardly towards our seacoast,” Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1808, after he had learned of such matters from the reports of Lewis and Clark. “These he would observe in the earliest stage of association, living under no law but that of nature,...

During a recent lecture tour I had occasion to reacquaint myself with the Pacific Northwest, where I used to teach some thirty years ago. The region offers lessons in the difference between American conditions and economic management and most of the rest of the world, to which the New World Order promises paradise: democracy, capitalism,...

Impromptu Produced by Stuart Oken and Daniel A. Sherkow Directed by James Lapine Screenplay by Sarah Kernochan Distributed by Hemdale Films Terminator 2: Judgment Day Produced and directed by James Cameron Screenplay by James Cameron and William Wisher A Carolco Picture Released by Tri-Star Sumer was icumen in. The air conditioners were humming and the...

Are we all going crazy? A few months ago, I read a newspaper column containing information so shocking yet unsurprising, so awful yet predictable, that I was overcome by emotional vertigo. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, I thought of John and Lawrence, two children I knew long ago, and disorientation was replaced by generalized depression....

“The nation must be grateful that millions of Americans . . . are being taught night after night lessons that may help them live more amicably with their fellow citizens.” That’s Walter Goodman, writing in the New York Times. “Goaded by minority groups,” he says, “commercial television has become a leader in the movement to...

The members of George Mason University’s Sigma Chi fraternity had little reason to believe their annual “Dress a Sig” fundraising event was politically incorrect. To those present last April 4, the proceedings seemed innocuous if a bit raucous. Participating sororities paraded members of Sigma Chi in women’s clothing across a stage, eliciting hoots and applause...

I began my relationship with Harvey visualizing Rolls-Royces and starlets. I ended up as so many writers have—staggering, script in hand, out of this erstwhile mogul’s office straight into the nearest bar; a cut-rate version of Ray Milland in The Lost Weekend. Attend to this cautionary tale, all of you who would avoid the same...

The Silence of the Lambs Produced by Kenneth Ull, Edward Saxon, and Ron Bozman Directed by Jonathan Demme Written by Ted Talley From the novel by Thomas Harris Released by Orion Open Doors Produced by Angelo Rizzoli Directed by Gianni Amelio Written by Vicenzo Cerami and Mr. Amelio From the novel by Leonardo Sciascia Released...

“Rochester had sprung up like a mush- room, but no presage of decay could be drawn from its hasty growth.” —Nathaniel Hawthorne The day after his 101st birthday, novelist Henry W. Clune escorted my wife and me to a fine local restaurant, where we dined in the Henry Clune Room. “It’s a sin to live...

The digitalization of recorded sound proceeds apace, and one of the best results is the refurbishment of old recordings. The Edison cylinders and 78’s of our grandparents’ and great-grandparents’ world are being processed into compact discs, saving space, time, and—best of all—preserving the music of worlds fast fading into oblivion. Taking the advice of the...

American leftists today yearn for a more receptive proletariat. They have virtually given up on the white working class, which they feel has been subverted by bourgeois values and the consumer society. Instead they have turned towards people of non-European stock to build a new base. The anti-Western “multiculturalism” that has become so controversial at...

American playwrights handle comedy better than tragedy, at least if this year’s Humana Festival of New American Plays at Actors Theatre of Louisville is any gauge. Richard Strand’s farce of corporate ladderclimbing, The Death of Zukavsky, and Jane Martin’s broad comedy about lady wrestlers, Cementville, were the two high points of the festival, and even...

Until recently everybody thought that the threat of the Soviet Union lay in its strength; today everybody wisely claims it lies in its weakness. For almost a century the sheer weight and size of the communist monolith made us shudder with fear. Nowadays the monolith is breaking up into parts that, like comets, threaten to...

Enterprise zones have been a pillar of the Republican antipoverty agenda for at least twelve years. But today enterprise zones (EZs) represent little more than government welfare by another name. As such, they symbolize a general Republican ideological decline from free-market conservatism to big-government welfarism. Originally, the idea was to use freemarket forces, not subsidies,...

Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead Produced by Michael Brandman and Emanuel Azenberg Written and directed by Tom Stoppard Released by Cinecom Scenes From a Mall Produced and directed by Paul Mazursky Written by Roger L. Simon and Mr. Mazursky Released by Buena Vista Pictures It is usually a reliable rule that when moviemakers decide to...

Just two centuries on, an echo of Edmund Burke and his most celebrated book has opportunely come out of Oxford. It is by Sir Ralf Dahrendorf, a German-born political scientist who is now warden of St. Antony’s College there; and it is called Reflections on the Revolution in Europe in a Letter Intended to have...

Mr. Conor Cruise O’Brien’s “A Vindication of Edmund Burke,” (National Review, December 17, 1990), contains many long established truths about Burke’s politics—his consistency in principle, his remarkable insights and powers of prophesy, his strong critique of revolutionary ideology, and so forth. But amidst these trite truisms, which vindicate O’Brien’s subject only to the uninitiated, he...

Some months ago a psychiatrist in control of a well-funded foundation, who was, as he supposed, investigating the subject, wrote me, soliciting my opinions about the relationship between “creativity” and “mental illness.” I felt nettled and helpless. I avoid using such terms, whenever possible. Like most writers, I suspect, when I compose a poem, a...

Whatever may be the outcome of the crisis in the Gulf, one thing is already certain: European intellectuals will no longer be polarized along ideological lines, but divided along geopolitical fault lines. For the first time the European right is marching hand-in-hand with the European left, in common protest against the U.S. involvement in the...

As the high lunacy of the 1990 budget negotiations showed, America’s federal arrangement has been replaced by a confederation of special interests that have less in common than the former colonies—or even, perhaps, than the states that comprise the United Nations. America resembles more a League of Interests than it does a nation. The solution...

The Godfather Part III Produced by Francis Ford Coppola Written by Mario Puzo and Mr. Coppola Directed by Mr. Coppola Released by Paramount Pictures Awakenings Produced by Walter F. Parkes and Lawrence Lasker Written by Steven Zaillian Directed by Penny Marshall Released by Columbia Pictures Alice Produced by Robert Greenhut Written and directed by Woody...