Pat Buchanan’s October article (“Mr. Lincoln’s War“) allows us to glimpse the concern, the love, and the care of those Americans savaged by the Civil War. Mr. Buchanan provided important insights into Abraham Lincoln’s different political stances before, during, and after the Civil War. The revisionist history that has been foisted upon our land is a betrayal of those who died or were wounded in the war. Our history has been ravaged by the machinations of those lusting for power, greed, or vainglory.

Thanks to Mr. Buchanan, I now have a review of the Civil War that gives me some measure of comfort and consolation, and for that I am grateful. And now I must go to Gettysburg again, and, at those tombs of the Civil War dead, bestir myself with conflict, because for so long their dedication—their ardor—has been misrepresented. Pat Buchanan’s love of the truth, “the love that survives the tomb,” has enabled me to understand this tumultuous period of American history.

        —Virginia G. Brunner
St. Louis, MO

On Naomi Wolf

Karina Rollins captured perfectly the essence of spoiled-brat feminism with her cogent review of Naomi Wolfs book Promiscuities: The Secret Struggle for Womanhood (“Naomi’s Secret,” October). Ms. Wolf is a textbook example of the postmodern, upper-middle-class, educated American woman who has too much time on her hands and who—having acquired a measure of celebrity and material success—now yearns for (nay, demands) recognition as a serious thinker. This type was best described by the late author Frederick Exley, who said that what annoyed him the most about Gloria Steinem was “her haughty insistence that her problems must become my problems.”

        —O.M. Ostlund, Jr.
State College, PA