The Ozark Mountains make up an area that American literature has largely passed by, leaving it the province of folklore and song, of homespun stories that seldom make their way to the lowlands. Ken Carey’s fine new book about the region, Flat Rock Journal, fills a great void, and not simply because with a literature...
Seed From Madagascar, first published in 1937 and now printed for the third time, is an agrarian memoir. Its author was one of the last rice planters of coastal Carolina, from a family who had been in the business for two centuries. Duncan Heyward details the methodology of rice planting as only one well acquainted...
Patrick Allitt’s study of Catholic intellectuals and their relationship to postwar conservatism is clearly presented and full of stimulating perceptions. Basic to this book is the contrast between two generations of American Catholic thinkers with some connection to the right: the generation of the 50’s as typified by the Catholic anticommunists grouped around National Review...
The editors of The Oxford Companion to the Bible describe their work as “an authoritative reference for key persons, places, events, concepts, institutions, and realities of biblical times” and as a guide to the current “interpretation of these topics by modern scholars.” They present the Bible (the Old and New Testaments and the Apocrypha) in...
Among a people generally corrupt liberty cannot long exist. —Edmund Burke I was reading Arthur Goldhammer’s translation of Maurice Lever’s Sade as the Senator Packwood scandal raged on, and although I wouldn’t want to draw any unwarranted comparisons between the two bonhommes, the parallels between Ancien Régime France and contemporary America are unmistakable. Debauchery reigns...
It is ironic that the modern environmentalist movement was founded bv men with whom most modern environmentalists would have nothing to do today: game hunters, many so avid for the chase that they would spend fortunes to collect antlers and skins and skulls from far-off places. Theodore Roosevelt, to name one distinguished early conservationist, was...
This slim book packs quite a punch. Its author requires that, in order to read him, we cast off the distorted language and prepackaged thought we absorb from the hum of the media. Indeed, he wants us to awaken from the slumber which that drone is designed to deepen. You might say that Mr. Berry...
[The Fatten Mind: The Professional Development of an Extraordinary Leader, by Roger H. Nye (Wayne, NJ: Avery Publishing Group) 224 pp., $12.95] The perfect gift for the armchair warrior. The Patton Mind traces the intellectual development of a “profane man of action” who, Roger Nye notes, “left behind the most complete record of exhaustive professional...
Years after his arrest by the Soviet authorities, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, while recuperating in a prison hospital after a cancerous tumor had been cut from his body, cast out the last remnant of a spiritual tumor from his soul. A prison doctor, soon to die by the hand of another zek, “fervently” recounted to Solzhenitsyn his...
Years ago, in his essay “Football Red and Baseball Green,” Murray Ross contrasted the battlefield dynamics of the former with the latter’s ostensibly more pastoral qualities. By virtue of its subtle but intense mannerisms, its lack of time limit and essentially cyclic action—a “summer game” that in fact encompasses spring’s renewal and autumn’s decline—baseball has...
You may have thought this country’s problems stemmed from runaway central government, but Clint Bolick is here to tell you that the real threat is down the street. “Local government in its various forms is today probably more destructive of individual liberty than even the national government,” says Bolick, chief lawyer of the Institute for...
“I esteem . . . Toleration to be the chief Characteristical Mark of the True Church.” —John Locke It is fitting that the most confused and confusing legal tradition in America today is First Amendment case law regarding religious liberty. It is confusing because at the Founding a young nation composed principally of strongly religious...
The main fact of American politics in the 1990’s is that the elites of both major parties have moved so far from the values and interests of the middle class that a third party has begun to rise almost spontaneously to fill the void. In Colorado, this third-party-to-be-named-later passed an amendment denying special rights to...
Our Founding Fathers understood that they had inaugurated a republican federal union unique in its balance and distribution of powers. Unlike their descendants, who self-indulgently congratulate themselves on their democracy, the Fathers also understood that the preservation of such a regime was a daunting and demanding task, requiring virtue (in the masculine Roman sense) on...
Long regarded by critics, fans, and various of his colleagues at the New Yorker as America’s finest literary journalist, 85-year-old Joseph Mitchell had not, until recently, published a word since 1965, and people wondered what he was doing in his small cubicle at the New Yorker‘s offices, where he has regularly appeared for over half...
“In dirt and darkness hundreds stink content.” —Alexander Pope Despite the hype that welcomed this book—gushing praise in the Wall Street Journal and National Review and a bash hosted by the Kristols for the Bradley Foundation—Myron Magnet’s study of American political culture is surprisingly sound. The reasons the neoconservatives showcased this work are obvious: namely,...
“All great peoples are conservative; slow to believe in novelties; patient of much error in actualities; deeply and forever certain of the greatness that is in law, in custom once solemnly established, and now no longer recognized as just and final.” —Thomas Carlyle As the Clintons’ socialist steamroller grinds out new programs, new entitlements, higher...
There is a cartoon that I see from time to time called “Pluggers,” a one-panel affair offering variations on a single theme: “You’re a plugger if. . . . ” One can qualify as a plugger by virtue of having stacked a woodpile taller than his house; loaded a freezer full of individual servings of...
You don’t have to read far into the story collection Thief of Lives before John Cheever’s name comes to mind, but after so many years of writing, Kit Reed must be used to that comparison. By now she should be replying: “Yes, but I write as well as that man did and occasionally even better....
One can no better describe the subject of this book than by quoting the publisher’s press release: Once there was a group of liberals and Leftists. They were Democrats, they were radicals, they were freedom riders. But they became disillusioned by the Left. They moved toward the Right, they opposed the anti-war movement, they made...
The frontiers of the world breed many men of John Audubon’s ilk: footloose, intemperate, experimental, in questionable standing with the law. He is better known today for the conservation society that bears his name—a group that began as a birdwatching organization and evolved into a powerful lobbying force—than for his singular contributions to American science,...
Early last October, there was an item in the national news that stirred some pity and some memories. “Minnesota Fats” (Rudolph Wanderone) had been taken into custody in Nashville after being found wandering the streets in a state of disorientation. A legend in his own mind, “Minnesota Fats” took his sobriquet from the fictional character...
The Decomposition of Sociology, an anthology of essays, testifies to the breadth of its author’s interests and reading. While the book has a central theme—which is the problems, some self-inflicted, that modern sociologists face in making their discipline rigorous and nonideological—within the confines of that theme, Horowitz ranges freely and confidently among many topics, some...
“Man’s extremity is God’s opportunity.” —Thomas Adams Conspiracy theories have found a ready audience in many countries in many different times. When cataclysmic events shock a country to its foundations, when people feel impotent before history’s tidal wave, when war or economic collapse or political disintegration mark the end of a historical era and, having...
“Pity the man who loves what death can touch.” —Eugene O’Neill Late one summer afternoon, tired and dirty after four days’ camping and a 21-mile ride out of the Wind River Mountains over rough granite trails, 1 swung off the horse and opened the registry book that the National Forest Service places at the boundary...
All literary genres have their loyalists, but few have more devoted—and querulous—readers than the Western. So when in the mid-1980’s rumors began to circulate that Larry McMurtry, hitherto known for his angst-ridden tales of modern Texas, was at work on an epic oater, shoot-’em-up fans began looking for a noose, sure that the bespectacled belletrist...
John Dewey, Neil Coughlan thought, I was “the philosopher par excellence of American liberalism” because “he shared with it the root conviction that we can have both self-defined self-fulfillment and social justice for all.” This sunny picture of human nature can hardly be squared with modern or contemporary history. Nevertheless, as Quentin Anderson argues, the...
“Modern liberty begins in revolt.” —H.M. Kallen In 1943, in the midst of the dark years of World War II when collectivism seemed to be sweeping all before it at home and abroad, three fiercely independent and feisty women, all of them friends and libertarians devoted to what was then called “individualism,” hurled mighty manifestos...
Perhaps the best way to understand and appreciate Joseph Pappin’s unique achievement is to consider this fine book in the light of previous scholarship that attempts to ascertain the religious and moral sources and foundations of Edmund Burke’s political philosophy. John Morley, the chief Victorian authority on Burke and the source of all subsequent empiricist,...
Professor Neusner, one of the world’s most accomplished scholars in the field of religious studies, begins by proclaiming that as a practicing and believing Jew he says a polite “No” to another practicing and believing Jew—but one who made extraordinary claims for himself —Jesus of Nazareth. Both the “No” and the politeness come out clearly...
Why does the South adore Stonewall Jackson? He was not a particularly lovable man. And he was certainly not a romantic, dashing cavalier, like Jeb Stewart; a stainless aristocrat calmly daring all the odds, like Robert E. Lee; or even a wizard of the saddle, like Bedford Forrest. Yet at Stone Mountain, Georgia—the Confederacy’s Mount...
The academic presses are often the source of the most exciting books, though these volumes too often escape the notice of the larger public. Robert Wallace’s study of Melville and Turner will no doubt find its place in university libraries, but I think such a work should be included in community and private libraries, since...
My mother would call Allan Carlson a man gifted with “common sense.” In her eyes this was high praise. She was right in this as in so many things. Carlson’s most recent entry into the seemingly interminable debate about “whither the family?” or even “whether the family?” is marked by a refreshingly clear writing style:...
Bitter attacks, tenacious defenses, and great promotion—not to speak of the best TV in a generation—have made David Brock’s book on The Real Anita Hill a best-seller. As Brock admits, he proves neither Clarence Thomas’s innocence nor Anita Hill’s perfidy. But by scouring the transcript of the Senate hearings, he does show that Hill’s reputation...
The collapse of communist systems has not eliminated the need for a better understanding of the impact they had and how and why they persisted. Only in the aftermath of their unraveling has it become possible to gain insight into these matters as books earlier suppressed are published and as the people of the former...
“It is as hard to tell the truth as to hide it.” —Baltasar Gracián While the conservative movement, like the liberal one, has its share of dishonest and fraudulent people, liberalism is itself an inherently dishonest business whose promulgators have been lying to themselves, as well as to everyone else, lo these many generations. As...
The Hard to Catch Mercy, William Baldwin’s entrancing first novel, is bound to remind some readers of Mark Twain, especially of some of the bleaker pages of moral fables like The Mysterious Stranger and The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg. But Baldwin’s purpose is not to piggyback a Grand Master. He desires to remind us of...
The recent passing of Mel Bradford has cast a chastening light upon this latest of his collections. Who had wished to be reminded of the author’s indispensability in this or indeed any other way? Yet reminded we are and must be. This book means much in itself as it stands, and means more as the...
A favorite exhortation of those seeking to further restrict or remove the private possession of firearms in the United States is to “look at other countries,” where lower murder rates are supposed to be a result of gun control laws. The underlying presumption beneath these laws is that guns cause crime. Getting rid of guns,...
“Sin maketh nations miserable.” —Proverbs 14:34 In “On the Reading of Old Books,” C.S. Lewis bemoans the fact that so many modern readers study recently written books rather than the classics, which have stood the test of time. This is true even of theology students, about whom Lewis writes: “Whenever you find a little study...
“Less is more” has proved to be (more often than less) a dreadful aesthetic credo, inspiring and justifying boldly insipid architecture better suited to robots than to humans, monotonous music in which the intervals of silence are the most welcome parts, minimalist visual art that is an insult to the visible universe, and poems little...
“One bates an author that’s all author.” —Lord Byron The line between the Old America and the New is closer than most of us think. A single generation separates not only the Western pioneer from the St. Louis suburbanite, it separates the New Woman from the Old. Rose Wilder Lane, child of westering parents, was...
In December 1982, Dr. Jack Yoffa of Syracuse, New York, took Zomax, a painkiller, just before driving to the hospital for minor surgery. About halfway there, Yoffa began to itch and turn red. Within 60 seconds, he was unconscious. His car hit a guardrail, crossed a three-lane highway (narrowly missing several cars), knocked over a...
P.D. James has attracted notice for how well she is able, within the confines of her mystery novels, to write about contemporary British society. Reviewing Devices and Desires in the New York Review of Books some time ago, Hilary Mantel made the suggestion that it was perhaps time for James to “slide out of her...
In an essay on Nietzsche written in 1947, Thomas Mann spoke of “the fascist epoch of the West” in which “we are living and, despite the military victory over fascism, shall continue to live for a long time.” Gene Edward Veith, Jr., dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Concordia University of Wisconsin...
When a civilization nearly two millennia in the building comes to an end, common decency requires that the world take note of its passing. For if ordinary people, born only to die in much less than a century, deserve a proper burial, what obsequies arc owing to a way of forming society and living life...
Weighing in at more than 500 dense and provocative pages, Charles Taylor’s Sources of the Self (Harvard, 1989) was clearly not intended for the general reader; at just over 100 pages. The Ethics of Authenticity is much more accessible. While not a fully “polished” work, this slim volume is so full of valuable insights I...
“Education is the process of driving a set of prejudices down your throat.” —Martin H. Fischer In March 1989, four young men in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, lured a retarded 17-year-old girl into a basement playroom, where they proceeded to rape her, penetrate her with a baseball bat and a broom handle, and generally brutalize...
“All the great things have been done by little nations.” —Benjamin Disraeli There is definitely less to Paul Kennedy’s new book than might appear on the surface of it. Preparing For the Twenty-First Century is an odd combination of old-fashioned doomsday alarmism, the modern lust for total planning, and the equally contemporary demand for a...
Poetry, short story, novel, drama, screenplay, criticism, the teaching of writing: George Garrett has excelled across the entire spectrum of literary art. I can call to mind no other contemporary American writer who approaches this feat, though perhaps Garrett’s friend Fred Chappell comes closest. But, what is even rarer for a first-rank artist, Garrett also...