Straight Shooting: What's Wrong with America and How to Fix Itby john silberharper and row, 336 pages, $22.50 This book's seemingly presumptuous subtitle prepared me not to like it. That predisposition was quickly set aside, as was the presumption of presumption. This is a very good book, well worth . . . . Continue Reading »
Here it comes again, after shimmering dead all winter, stretching, flexing, limbering, unleashing hordes of feather-cut leaves that look like dragon tongues, a silty river bronze, before they flatten to assume their summer-long, grass-emulating green. Gone in a few . . . . Continue Reading »
Eastern Europe in 1990 is not to be confused with Africa in 1960. African decolonization was a relatively peaceful affair. It was sponsored and financed by the former colonial powers, and the new regimes, with one or two exceptions, accepted either some semblance of democracy or a benevolent . . . . Continue Reading »
Poor Time. Twenty-four years ago this month, the magazine brought us its Nietzschean fears with its famous red-on-black cover, “Is God Dead?” More recently, apparently, the agnostic editors of Time experienced a crisis of faith over the secular substitute for God, and thus presented the . . . . Continue Reading »
Twin Powers: Politics and the Sacred by thomas molnar eerdmans, 147 pages, $9.95 One of the most distinctive features of post-Enlightenment Western culture is its desacralization of the cosmos, the flip side of secularism. Not only has daily life been transformed by science—for example, we no . . . . Continue Reading »
It is doubtful that there is any substantial American consensus on what the flag symbolizes, because it is becoming hard to specify in what sense this increasingly heterogeneous country is a “nation.” . . . . Continue Reading »
Beginning with the Supreme Court’s Webster decision of last July, Americans were delighted, distressed, or simply puzzled to discover that abortion was back in the political arena. It had been abruptly “removed from politics” by the Roe v. Wade decision of 1973, when it became a question . . . . Continue Reading »
Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Ageby modris ecksteinshoughton mifflin (a peter davison book), 396 pages, $24.95 Modris Eksteins’ disturbing and fascinating book ranges between the Sergei Diaghilev-managed opening night performance of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring . . . . Continue Reading »
In Pursuit: Of Happiness and Good Governmentby charles murraysimon and schuster, 341 pages, $19.95 In January of 1964 President Lyndon Johnson's Council of Economic Advisers helped launch the War on Poverty by including in its annual report a chapter on “The Problem of Poverty in America.” . . . . Continue Reading »
The decade of the 1980s has proved to be an ideological watershed. It has been marked by a huge resurgence of the power and efficacy of the capitalist market system and a corresponding collapse of confidence in the capacity of socialist “command economies.” This loss of confidence in . . . . Continue Reading »
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