“Everything is good when it comes from the hands of the Almighty; everything degenerates in the hands of man.” —Jean Jacques Rousseau, Emile Not the least of the ironies of the modern age is that the more it pretends to rationality, the more it wallows in the irrational. In the last...
“[I]f I were not a Catholic, I would have no reason to write, no reason to see, no reason to feel horrified or even to enjoy anything . . . I feel myself that being a Catholic has saved me a couple of thousand years in learning to write.” —Flannery O’Connor...
In the world of blue bloods and blue books, where nicknames like “Oatsie,” “Tootsie,” “Bunny,” and “Babe” abound, being called “Sister” isn’t particularly unusual. Even in her professional life. Sister Parish never used her given name, Dorothy May, though regarding her nickname she once commented, It has not been an easy cross to bear. My...
This “celebration” of his intense love affair with America will not likely teach Norman Podhoretz’s devotees anything new. For the most part, it incorporates material that can be found in earlier autobiographical writings and in Podhoretz’s other published recollections about life in New York literary circles. My Love Affair With America includes an extended description...
Restless Nation is an enjoyable exploration of the American national character. The book presents a plausible hypothesis, supported by the author’s broad knowledge of the nation’s history and social trends and illustrated throughout by aptly chosen literary references that reflect admirably wide reading. The problem is that, despite all these positives, I just don’t buy...
When the jacket blurb tells you that the book before you “basically combines a kojevian notion of global market as post-history (in this sense akin to Fukuyama’s eschatology) with a Foucauldian and Deleuzian notion of bio-politics (in this sense crossing the road of a Sloterdijk who also poses the question of a coming techniques of...
Jeffrey Meyers, a biographer whose fascination with the literary life is touchingly suggestive of the enthusiasm small boys used to have for the railroading one, is the only person I can think of who would consider it a “privilege” to be led on, toyed with, lied to, and finally betrayed by V.S. Naipaul. Scott Fitzgerald...
The Nilsens have produced an interesting, erudite, and thorough Encyclopedia of 2Oth-Century American Humor with entries ranging from American Indian humor to cartoons, exaggeration, hoaxes, joke patterns, sitcoms, and wit. It is a truly comprehensive and encyclopedic volume with an excellent bibliography, a work that will become a standard reference not just in libraries but...
Bill Clinton has often been compared to Warren C. Harding, and considering that president’s scandals and adulterous affair within the White House, the parallel seems valid. The better comparison, however, may be with Harding’s predecessor, Woodrow Wilson. At least that is the impression one gets reading James Bovard’s book. Under Wilson, the country witnessed a...
There are historical reasons—historical in more than one sense—why we should be glad to see this work back in print. Since I can so well remember owning the editions of 1959 and 1968 and absorbing their contents, the thought that these essays will reach new readers in the new millennium is a pleasant one. And...
“An outlaw fumbling for the latch, a voice Commanding in a dream where no flag flies.” —Donald Davidson, “Lee in the Mountains” The University of Missouri’s publication of Where No Flag Flies: Donald Davidson and the Southern Resistance does much to redress a literary grievance. Donald Davidson, the late poet and professor of English at...
[Lewis: Painter and Writer, by Paul Edwards (New Haven and London: Yale University Press) 584 pp. $75.00] Professor Edwards has set himself to a daunting task in taking on Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957). Lewis the painter is a difficult task for many reasons: first, because he attacked the British art establishment early on, trashing Roger Fry...
In recent months, several works have appeared that throw light on the attitudes and concerns of various rightist movements lacking the imprimatur of an established right. While it is hard to generalize about the disparate thinkers and groups featured in these books, they are alike in having no relationship to the American right. Also characteristic...
Americans like to think this is a land of diversity unparalleled anywhere in the world, but in religious matters at least, such a view is far from the truth. America remains today substantially what it has always been, namely, a Christian country. While the United States is indeed home to a remarkable number of religious...
“But what is liberty without wisdom, and without virtue?” —Edmund Burke Murray Rothbard was like the elephant the blind Chinamen in the story tried to describe. Everyone who knew Murray saw only one or two sides of him: There was Murray the happy warrior who campaigned for the soul of the Old Right, the New...
Totally innocent of the myth of progress and the scandal of death and failure that account for modern sentimentality in its most wrongheaded and obnoxious form, Set the Ploughshare Deep is as realistic a work as a novel by Thomas Hardy or the Old Testament. Tractor and combine axle-deep in muck, seedcorn and soybeans frozen...
“Monstrum horrendum, informe ingens.” —Vergil, Aeneid In 1974, I first encountered one of the creatures E. Michael Jones writes about in Monsters From the Id. It appeared in the guise of one of my graduate-school classmates. She was a bright, pretty woman who seemed unusually self-possessed and accomplished for a 22-year-old. My impression changed, however,...
When I was a senior in high school, a local Christian Reformed pastor recruited me and a few friends to play Christmas carols as his congregation filed into church during Advent. Since our brass quartet also played the recessional, we would sit through the service. One Sunday, the pastor—locally renowned as a thought-provoking speaker—began his...
Although Paul Craig Roberts, a nationally syndicated columnist and Hoover Institution fellow, and Lawrence M. Stratton, a fellow of the Institute for Political Economy, are trained in economic and legal analysis, they have written a book that seeks to appeal to civic virtue at the popular level. They do so mainly by weaving together dozens...
Anyone writing a novel about thoroughbred racing in Kentucky would think first of setting it at Churchill Downs—that brassy track in Louisville which holds its tinsel-television spectacle of the Kentucky Derby every May. Instead, Alyson Hagy chose Keeneland, Lexington’s track set in the middle of the Bluegrass horse farms. Keeneland is smaller, greener, more pleasant...
Like the Roman cursus honorum, the ascending path of neoconservative success is carefully prescribed. Instead of the progress from aedile to consul, however, the journey leads through hackwork up to the glories of publishing with Basic Books, appearing on TV talk shows, and gracing the mastheads of neocon magazines. David Frum managed to move through...
[Jefferson Davis: Unconquerable Heart, by Felicity Allen (Columbia: University of Missouri Press) 808 pp., $34.95] “As the tug bore him away from the ship, he stood with bared head between the files of undersized German and other foreign soldiers on either side of him, and as we looked, as we thought, our last upon his...
“He that is proud eats himself up; pride is his own glass, his own trumpet, his own chronicle.” —William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida What shall we say of Garry Wills who, with a doctorate in the classics, once purportedly showed promise as a conservative intellectual, only to become the historian-icon of...
Now nearly 80 years of age, Richard Wilbur has recently published Mayflies, a new book of poems and translations. This slim volume has attracted slight—and sometimes slighting—notice in most literary publications. America’s poetry establishment does not quite know what to make of its former poet laureate. For half a century, this eminent translator of 17th-...
As the book’s title has all the lyric delicacy of a Rolex advertising campaign, and as we quickly discover that its author is neither a philosopher nor a watchmaker, it becomes clear at the outset that what we are up against is the most irritating of genres, popular science. In Mr. Waugh’s defense, I hasten...
Jacques Barzun’s 30-somethingth book, I though published by HarperCollins, bears the unmistakable stamp of Columbia University, from whose college the author graduated, where he was appointed Seth Low Professor of History, and served for ten years as dean of faculties and provost. I refer, of course, to the college’s once renowned, now démodé, Western Civilization...
“The mission of the United States is one of benevolent assimilation.” —William McKinley In his classic study of “isolationism,” Not to the Swift, Justus Doenecke takes note of a phenomenon called “Asia Firstism”—the view of conservative politicians and publicists of the postwar era who opposed meddling in Europe but saw Asia as the equivalent of...
The Case Against Hillary Clinton is a strange book. It would be less strange if it were titled Peggy Noonan’s Psychoanalyses, Future Speculations, and General Meanderings, Which Are All Well-Written and Witty. But a book billed as an indictment of the First Lady, written by none other than Ronald Reagan’s most lauded speechwriter, creates certain...
Travel writing in the post-World War II era gradually became the prosaic stuff of Sunday newspaper supplements, nothing more than Baedeker-type guides to fancy hotels and chic restaurants in foreign capitals. Bruce Chatwin revived the classic traveling-by-the-seat-of-your-pants school, a genre historically practiced by worldly wandering Brits as disparate as Lord Byron, Richard Burton, and Graham...
When novelist Larry Woiwode moved to a house and a little piece of land just off State Highway 21 in the loneliest corner of North Dakota, he left behind the world of New York and the New Yorker for a part of America which, if it conjures any image in the coastal mind, is that...
“First grubs obscene, then wriggling worms, Then painted butterflies.”—Alexander Pope, Phryne Maybe I’m bewitched, but I’m not bothered and certainly I’m not bewildered by Sean Griffin’s too divinely unbelievable disquisition on one of everybody’s favorite topics, and I’m not going to waste space by saying what that is, because you just...
This is the third and newest book in Sally Wright’s well-received “Ben Reese Mystery Series.” The first two—Pride and Predator and Publish and Perish—drew rave reviews from the Washington Times, National Review, Publishers Weekly, and the redoubtable Ralph McInerny. The new book’s premise is intriguing. It’s 1961. Elderly Scottish professor Georgina Fletcher leaves an Oxford...
John Richardson, the brilliant biographer of Picasso, resembles (by his own account) those charming and attractive young men of limited means and boundless ambition—right out of the novels of Stendhal and Balzac—who use any means to make their way in the world. The son of an English soldier, educated at Stowe school and the Slade...
“There was a time when the United States had heroes and reveled in them. There was a time when Andrew Jackson was one of those heroes, along with the men who stood with him at New Orleans and drove an invading British army back to the sea.” So begins Robert Remini’s The Battle of New...
“As fire is kindled by fire, so is a poet’s mind kindled by contact with a brother poet.” —John Keble, Lectures on Poetry, XVI Dear Jimbo, I am sending this c/o the Dead Poets Society. I hope it reaches you all right. Sure, it’s doubtful, I know. But, then again, why not? About the afterlife...
Imagine, if you will, a residential street in Madison, Wisconsin, where every neighbor is a member of the university faculty. Is this a metaphor for Hell? A trip to the Twilight Zone? A sequel to Richard Russo’s tenure-track satire, Straight Man, or Jane Smiley’s Moo? None of the above. The Society of Friends is a...
Orde Wingate (1903-44), the most eccentric and innovative commander in World War II, was remarkably like his distant cousin Lawrence of Arabia. Both came from a guilt-ridden fundamentalist (Scots Presbyterian and Plymouth Brethren) background and grew up in an atmosphere of religious gloom and repression. Both were short and slight (5’6″ and only 130 pounds),...
“My views on Hammett expressed [above]. He was tops. Often wonder why he quit writing after The Thin Man. Met him only once, very nice looking tall quiet gray-haired fearful capacity for Scotch, seemed quite unspoiled to me. (Time out for ribbon adjustment.)” —Raymond Chandler, Letter to Alex Barris Why should...
“The depravity of Tiberius, or the salacity of Suetonius,” wrote Anthony Burgess, “had left its mark on an island all sodomy, lesbianism, scandal and cosmopolitan artiness.” For the last 150 years, writers have been attracted to the natural beauty as well as the lechery of Capri—20 miles across the bay from Naples, four miles long,...
“A people still, whose common ties are gone; Who, mixed with every race, are lost in none.”—George Crabbe Kevin MacDonald’s study of the Jewish people in sociobiological perspective will not likely help his career, for reasons having nothing to do with the author’s scholarship or his accumulation of pertinent evidence. While...
“There is no salvation to he extracted from the Holocaust, no faltering Judaism can he revived by it, no new reason for the continuation of the Jewish people can he found in it. If there is hope after the Holocaust, it is because to those who believe, the voice of the...
From 1957 to 1990, Michael Wharton, under the pen name of “Peter Simple,” was partly or solely responsible for writing the Daily Telegraph‘s famous “Way of the World” column. Now well into his 80’s, he continues to write in the same paper under the name of Marryat’s hero, though Telegraph readers are rationed to just...
Fame, even mere celebrity, creates a reality of its own. We are often curious about the reality behind the image, and if sometimes we are disappointed, we have to admit also that sometimes we are not. The story that Professor Ramage tells with authority cannot be thought of as disappointing in any way. In that...
“The tone and tendency of liberalism . . . is to attack the institutions of the country under the name of reform and to make war on the manners and customs of the people under the pretext of progress.”—Benjamin Disraeli, “Speech in London” The collapse of the Soviet Union not only...
“No evil is greater than anarchy.” —A Latin Proverb With author’s fees in eight figures and print runs to match, Thomas Harris’s cannibal is what publishers call a phenomenon. “I should’ve written that!” agonize America’s ambitious housewives on their way to becoming failed writers. “I can’t believe that this is what...
In Flint’s Honor, Richard Wheeler has painted a realistic portrait of life in a Colorado mining town, with special emphasis on the importance of newspapers in the civic life of the frontier West. Sam Flint (a character continuing to develop from two earlier Wheeler novels) is an idealistic newspaperman first drawn to raucous Silver City...
Henry Regnery (1912-1996), as Jeffrey Nelson observes in his introduction, was “one of the unsung heroes of the last half-century of American cultural life.” Henry Regnery Company (now Regnery Publishing, Inc.), which he founded in 1947, gave America’s nascent conservative movement a beachhead in the monolithically liberal publishing world: The breakthrough was the publication of...
“Poetry is the language of a state of crisis. —Stephane Mallarme Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky’s remembrance of his first day in class with a professor who—if his stubborn presence in the work of several generations of students and now even the students of those students is any measure—must have been one of...
While Russell Kirk (1918-1994) has been widely recognized as a formative figure in the postwar conservative revival, his reputation has undergone dramatic changes since the publication of his magisterial The Conservative Mind in 1953. In the 1950’s, Newsweek and Time hailed the young scholar as “one of the foremost intellectual spokesmen for the conservative position”...
Travel writers are a diverse lot. The great ones—Evelyn Waugh, Somerset Maugham, Graham Greene—sought out the seedy outposts of colonialism, frequenting hotel bars peopled by jaded, witty expatriates. Others, such as Bruce Chatwin, who tramped through Patagonia and Afghanistan with only a rucksack, preferred roughing it. hi A Passage to Juneau: A Sea and Its...