Earnest Lives: New and Notable Books

Ralph Waldo Emerson once declared, “All history resolves itself very easily into the biography of a few stout and earnest persons”—a good example of transcendentalist bluster. Samuel Johnson was less grandiose but did find particular lives a superior mode of moral instruction: “No species of writing seems more worthy of cultivation than biography.” Several books have come out recently that cover the lives and thought of persons who illuminated—and sometimes shaped—the times in which they lived. Here are some of them.

In A World We Share: Hannah Arendt and the Power of Friendship in a Broken World, Roger Berkowitz profiles one of the most interesting intellectuals of mid-century America. “What I find so powerful in Arendt’s work is her boldness, her willingness to speak her mind, and unyielding insistence on thinking for herself,” he writes. That willfulness didn’t get in the way of meaningful bonds, however. For much of her life, Arendt had no country and no family. Close comrades were a help, and disagreements that arose rarely ended those friendships for good. Even her most painful rupture proved temporary. Arendt broke with Heidegger, her former teacher and lover, when he joined the Nazi Party. What shocked her most, though, was not the party membership but his apparent role in removing university privileges from his retired mentor, Edmund Husserl, who was Jewish. She reconciled with Heidegger after the war. Berkowitz sees this and other episodes of friendship as a lesson. There is something precious in the bare event of mutual attention. We don’t have to agree; we only have to be honest with one another.

The Essential Paul Gottfried: Essays from 1984–2024 collects Gottfried’s observations on fascism and anti-fascism, William F. Buckley and the world of National Review, Karl Marx and Herbert Marcuse, neoconservatism and the “alternative right” (a label Gottfried coined), Judaism and anti-Semitism, and more. Throughout these nearly five hundred pages of short essays on people, places, and controversies, Gottfried cites his own experience, which often differs from conventional versions of things. For example, in current liberal thinking about civics education, leading voices insist that America acknowledge its sins, that our history include inconvenient truths, and that patriotism be tempered with guilt. This is understood to be an honest and constructive reconciliation. But Gottfried calls it a “politics of guilt,” in which “Western Protestant societies have expressed deep remorse over their misdeeds, including exaggerated or invented ones.” In other words, a fair amount of virtue-signaling is involved. I find that take on things both accurate and satisfying. It is to Gottfried’s credit as an independent and discerning mind that the entries at the end of this forty-year itinerary are as fresh as those at the beginning.

Eight or nine years ago, I saw Charlie Kirk speak for the first time. To us old guys, he was a kid who’d organized impressive support for Donald Trump in 2016. No question, though: He had the magic. His smile, voice, and happy resolve charmed everyone in the room, and that charm only grew and deepened as the years passed. Last December, I did a school visit in Jacksonville and wrote my observations in a report for City Journal, including this fact: After the assassination, two seniors started a Turning Point USA chapter, and within weeks eighty kids had signed up. Charlie Kirk, In His Own Words, is a powerful testimonial. It’s an elegant coffee-table book with lovely photographs; hundreds of Kirk’s epigrammatic opinions on Christianity, immigration, sex, pornography, politics, and patriotism; and testimonials from Melania Trump, Ted Cruz, and many more. 

The republication of Blessed Fulton J. Sheen’s The Power of Love is timely. In forty-four brief commentaries, Sheen addresses a variety of topics but brings them all back to the central condition of love—or its absence or distortion. “Modern woman has been made equal with man,” he writes in one essay, “but she has not been made happy”—a statement borne out by surveys in the twenty-first century. In a note on “The Meaning of Life,” he regrets the degree to which daily experience has slipped into a “succession of television shows, a rapidity of newscasts interrupted by commercials,” which condemn us to “mere factual, unrelated nothingness.” Imagine what he would say of the iPhone. 

In The Iron Broom: Turning Oppression into Opportunity, David Sawatzki recounts three generations of hardship, from his grandfather in World War II and his parents in the 1950s to himself in the ’70s, when he served as a prison guard—a fate only mildly better than that of an inmate. The cruelty is spiritual as well as physical. One day, Sawatzki is called from the shooting range to the officer’s tent, where he is asked to explain his obstinate faith in God. Sawatzki doesn’t waver. His faith carries him through the hardship and eventual escape from the USSR to West Germany. It is the small details that resonate most, not the Cold War and geopolitics. People celebrate Christmas in silence and darkness; a doctor classifies Sawatzki as a patient so that he can stick around and repair the hospital windows. It is a battle for everyone to keep from becoming “senseless creatures void of feeling, compassion, self-worth.”