Christmas Book Recommendations
Christmas Book Recommeudatious We offer here gift suggestions from some of the authors whose writings would top our own list of recommendations. In doing so, we hope to provide not only useful...
...Strange To reach that age, remember a tide 22 The Alternative: An American Spectator December 1976 And full for a time be young...
...In 1976 the federal deficit alone will be at least ten times greater than the entire federal budget during Herbert, Hoover's final year as chief executive...
...Two of the three volumes have appeared...
...literary advisor to Charles So: ibner's Sons...
...It will help many to learn how much they don't know, and how poorly they think...
...There are glances at the most important discovery ever made in philosophy, his theory of ideas...
...An overpowering, overwhelming account of the disastrous human consequences of the war that the leaders of the Soviet Union have carried on against the Soviet people for years...
...Let's see now--I have been reading Stendhal's Lucien Leuwen and Onians' Origins of European Thought and a dozen more books per week...
...Omnipotent Government by Ludwig von Mises, a systematic and historical analysis of how governments become total, particularly through paternalism and the welfare state, often against the will of the people (who failed to see what was happening...
...He saw it almost happen in Chile and in Portugal...
...and the only "villain" is the legal system (which, by the way, Bleak House succeeded in reforming...
...It combines trenchant description with brilliant historical judgments and establishes the indispensable criteria for assessing and managing social undertakings, from the war on poverty to the avoidance of war itself...
...HUNTINGTON CAIRNS Former general counsel to the National Gallery of Art...
...Too many books have influenced me and delighted me...
...It taught me how to watch my own mind at work, and help it gain some little power over me, and me over it...
...How has this enormous reorientation of government been financed...
...He explains in his own excellent English why in proportion to our help from gadgets and machines those of us from whose calm contemplation the world might conceivably benefit are driven like squirrels in a wheelcage...
...LEWIS H. LAPHAM ~ditor, Harper's Magazine...
...Furnas...
...Every man has this in his library, and if he doesn't he should...
...The Last European War...
...The revealing chapter on the rise of Nazi Germany and its origins in Bismarck's welfare state is alone worth the price of the book...
...His Robespierre: The Voice of Virtue goes deep into the troubles that ensue when the majority of a nation tries to equate freedom and equality...
...and above all it is much more...
...Begin with It Was Like This (1949) or A Quiet Neighborhood (1947...
...All, by Louis Zukofsky...
...24 The Alternative: An-American Spectator December 1976...
...Milton Friedman Join Milton Friedman, William E. Simon, William F. Buckley, Jr., Irving Kristol, and thousands of other thoughtful Americans who read The Alternative...
...Law, Legislation, and Liberty by F.A...
...The Lady and the Tycoon by Rose Wilder Lane (ed...
...Assuming that everyone has read by now Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago, one will find this series of true historical accounts (presented in fictional form) of incidents in the Gulag, by an eyewitness who was a KGB officer at the time and later defected, to be one of the most absorbing and horrifying reminders of what the Gulag was and is...
...President...
...In a book laden with charts, tables, and fascinating statistics, Freeman examines this phenomenon, its consequences, and implications...
...But others will tell you of this...
...This is a view of Oriental thought that the Westerner will find illuminating...
...He is so fine a journalist that I fail to understand how it is that some of the frauds and fakers, who today call themselves journalists, have not had him blackballed, blacklisted, and thrown out of the union...
...The fools of history are still with us...
...That is why I suggest reading the novels--six of them--written a quarter-century ago by the late Anne Goodwin Winslow, a New Englander transplanted to the South and widely travelled besides...
...It is far more than a book about "conservatism in America...
...This book is full of masterfully handled erudition concerning the New England thinkers who were influenced by Darwin's conclusions about evolution, and who, in turn, prepared the ground and laid some of the foundation stones for the development of the philosophical tendency of pragmatism or instrumentalism associated with the names of Pierce, James, Dewey, and Mead...
...Political systems, when manipulated even by properly elected revolutionary governments, no longer provide the means for mediating and containing fundamental conflicts...
...Together with Bureaucracy and Socialism, this is the most readable of Mises' important books...
...One of the few exceptions to my (and Emerson's) rule not to read a book that has not been out for more than a year...
...James was a homosexual who considered he was above any law and custom...
...The American Irish by William V. Shannon...
...Proof that a masterpiece need not be serious...
...The Migration of Social Thought 1930-1965...
...Above all, there are people in it...
...An excellent statement of the kind of government we must have, and the limits of its power, if we are to avoid the totalitarian state...
...It manages to maintain a firm commitment to individualism and freedom without being doctrinaire, boring, or doleful...
...Toward Social Hope (1975) is again a small book...
...Far from painting a Galbraithean picture of social service deprivation at the hands of a bloated Pentagon, Freeman reveals that the opposite would be a more accurate portrayal...
...A lifetime's collected short poems...
...And I've discovered Washington Irving as the chronicler of the spread of Mohammedanism from India to the Pyrenees...
...Democracy and Poetry, by Robert Penn Warren...
...Author of The Pound Era, A Homemade World, and Geodesic Math...
...Hayek...
...Walter Berns, The First Amendment and the Future of Ameriaan Democrcwy (just out...
...And on more contemporary problems: Marguerite Higgins: Our Vietnam Nightmare, to understand what really went wrong, and why The Best and the Brightest, etc., etc., had to be written to obscure history...
...Indonesia...
...Another, Jacques Maritain's Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry, not so much for what it says about art, as for what it says about the pre-verbal workings of intelligence...
...Another favorite is Nicholas Berdayaev's Dostoevsky...
...The Third Policeman, by Flann O'Brien...
...The book is too long--but even the over-long chapters, e.g...
...It took only six more years for this already gigantic figure to double...
...decency, suffering, and redemption...
...Since 1900 public spending in the United States has increased more than 239 times...
...The most influential book ever published in the West, apart from the Bible...
...Charles Dickens...
...He touches upon this in a discussion of Paul Tillich--surely the most ambivalent of the group--but then drops the subject...
...Gilbert Murray: Four Stages of Greek Religion, to understand that a whole civilization can suffer a "failure of nerve...
...John Lukacs...
...Author, The Office of Prime Minister...
...Author of The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics, Experience of Nothingness, and The Joy of Sports...
...Mencken...
...Burtt...
...This peculiar mythic structure in the Western mind is exceedingly potent nowadays...
...1972 Libertarian Party Candidate for U.S...
...s a defense against the transience of the ~ews and as a reminder of what I'm mpposed to be looking for in the clutter of msolicited manuscripts, I have taken to _9 eading writers of established reputation...
...ROBERT L. BARTLEY Editorial Page Editor, The Wall Street Journal...
...To Freeman the "overpowering fact" for 1952-1972 has been a monumental change in the nature of governmental activity, particularly at the federal level: a "sudden and unprecedented explosion" of programs and expenditures for domestic social purposes...
...domestic services took nearly all of the rest...
...I re-read it after listening to the first FordCarter debate--and I found it the best antidote to cant, vulgarity, and jargon...
...I got a slow start on Fernand Braudel's The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II...
...BYRUM CARTER Professor of Political Science and former Chancellor, Indiana University...
...Five books for reading at Christmas or otherwise: George Orwell: Homage to Catalonia, to understand that intellectual disillusion with the left is nothing new...
...Then modulate to the short study, The Harmed Leisure Class (1970), by the Swedish economist and member of parliament Staffan B. Linder...
...In this year of the Bicentennial, America faces an arresthag fact: "social services and income distribution" have become"the core function of the United States government...
...This study contains a concise political and historical account of Indonesia, an incisive analysis of the role of the Chinese in that country, and a brilliant treatment of the contemporary problems of the process of decolonization...
...This, the critics rightly say, is not Dickens' "best" novel, in terms of literary craftmanship, plot, structure, or planning...
...Scott is currently working on his "third fool" biography, which will bring Woodrow Wilson to the bar of justice for believing, quite sincerely, that the Seychelles Islands could be the equal of Britain or America in a world parliament...
...Ulysses, by James Joyce...
...BOOK REVIEW The Growth of American Government: A Morphology of the Welfare State Roger A. Freeman / Hoover Institution Press / t8.95 George H. Nash When Herbert Hoover left the Presidency in 1933, the federal budget was less than five billion dollars...
...MARTIN E. MARTY ~rofessor, The University of Chicago...
...RONALD BERMAN Chairman, National Endowment for the Humanities...
...The Americans: A Social History of The United States, 1587-1914, by J.C...
...Discretions, by Mary de Rachewiltz...
...It may lead us to wonder, however much we may respect our ancestors, if we would want to invite them to dinner...
...Evolution and the Founders of Pragmatism by Philip P. Wiener...
...HUGH KENNER Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities, The Johns Hopkins University...
...Farrell's fiftieth book, The Dunne Family, was published in October by Doubleday...
...An autobiography that is on its way to becoming a classic...
...A worthy successor to his earlier The Constitution of Liberty...
...Delicacy linked with power is rare in fiction at any time and today more than ever...
...This is a good year in which to be reminded that subtle people have their place in democratic government...
...A philosophical classic, well-written, astonishingly packed with information and erudition, which deals with the bedeviling problem of epistemology, and the development of modern science from Copernicus to Newton in relationship to this problem...
...To make sure you receive your copy of The Alternative regularly (we are rarely found on newsstands), use this handy order form and subscribe today...
...The Royal Game and Other Stories by Stefan Zweig...
...I call him unique, because I want to claim Robert Nisbet as an historian, despite his willingness to consort with sociologists and to be known as one of them...
...There is more sex, more violence, and above all more social protest in Bleak House than in any of the literary pastrami sandwiches the New York "literary estabLishment" now churns out for the best-seller list...
...What has happened...
...An Underdeveloped Freedom by Sal Tas...
...Author of Herzog, Humboldt's Gift, and, just published, To Jerusalem and Back...
...His James I deals, not with the tyranny that comes when a majority is unchecked, but with the Stuart fool who tried to impose imperial thought control on England attd Scotland...
...Today it is eighty times higher...
...Moss has seen it happen in Nazi Germany and in post-World War II Prague, two places where pseudo-legality put the levers of government in the hands of totalitarians...
...Twenty years later, even during the extremely costly Vietnam War, defense spending had plummeted to less than onethird, while domestic services had grown to more than one-half...
...It taught the West scientific method...
...I have taken a firm oath to live until ninety so I can finish it...
...Freeman notes that in just ~renty years (1952 to 1972) the expend;tures of all levels of government in the United States surged upward by a staggering 277 billion dollars...
...DeGaulle's Memoirs...
...Will Durant's Renaissance is one of the volumes in his History of Civilization, a readable synthesis of the great modern centuries of Italy...
...it goes...
...The best old book I have read all year is "The Alternative is a consistently interesting, thoughtful, and lively magazine...
...In 1969 federal domestic expenditures reached $72 billion--180 years after George Washington became President...
...This book repays re-reading, especially in this election year--for it invokes the very best in the American tradition and gives hope in the fundamental sanity and strength of the Republic...
...In any event, his most recent essay, Sociology as an Art Form (1976), shows his critical and historical powers in brief compass...
...Ortega was more than a Revolt of the Masses-man, and McClintock points to his many worlds...
...A fitting successor to her great The Discovery of Freedom...
...After those short and suggestive works, all of them philosophical in the true sense, I would urge the reading of Jonathan Goodman on The Killing of Julia Wallace (1976...
...Hughes never raises the question why the witch doctors had such impact...
...Inexhaustible and relevant...
...How many critics of the supposedly insatiable "militaryindustrial complex" realize that the annual budget of the Department of HEW now substantially exceeds the budget of the Department of Defense ? In the course of analyzing recent trends in government spending, Freeman scrutinizes America's system of collecting public revenues as well...
...Clinton Rossiter...
...The best introduction to the subject is Douglas Bush's English Literature in the Earlier 17th Century...
...This has been called a "revisionist" history of the Hitler years--it is something more important...
...But it for me is his most moving one, and the one that will stay longest in the reader's mind There is no "hero...
...Man and His Circumstances: Ortega as Educator, by Robert McClintock...
...Freeman demonstrates that the aggrandizement of domestic social programs has largely taken place at the expense of appropriations for national defense...
...Between 1952 and 1972 governmental outlays for education rose 705 %, for social services and public welfare 1169...
...The Days of H.L...
...THE ALTERNATIVE, Subscription Department, P.O...
...I am always a poor target for your kind of inquiry...
...Durant sees history in terms of personality and leaves out things like economics or diplomacy that concern current historians...
...Jane Austen...
...since then this figure has increased more than ten times...
...Wodehouse, Uncle Fred in the Spm'ngtime...
...For those who want to understand the Irish in America, rather than to hate them, or regard them as clowns, this book is basic...
...of Emerson's Journals...
...Box 877, Bloomington, Indiana 47401 Please enter a [] new [] renewal subscription for: [] One year - - $10 [] Two years - - $18 [] Three years - - $25 [] Payment enclosed [] Please bill me Name Address City State .Zip 103B ['he Alternative: An American Spectator December 1976 23 Trol!ope's Barch,:s,~': ~ 7bwer~, the best relatively new book t ~c,,e read- all year is Thomas M~nn's Dr', F,_.;~stus, ~,nd the best recently published b<~ok I h~=ve read all year is Saul ]3eitow's 2% jerusalem anti Back...
...Author of The Age of Discontinuity, The End of Economic Man, and The Practice of Management...
...George Eliot, Afiddlemarch...
...Cairns is presently writing a book on Shakespeare, The Elements, by Euclid...
...Unfortunately Buchanan wrote in Latin, and his influence faded long before Locke and Burke revived his thinking...
...H. Stuart Hughes...
...A serious masterpiece that is good for the soul...
...In fact, Freeman observes, federal domestic spending actually increased more than fifty percent faster in the first term of President Nixon than in the comparable periods under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson...
...The last book by one of America's few great baseball writers of the last several decades...
...by implication, a splendidly idiosyncratic book about how physical creation hangs together...
...tssociate Editor, The Christian Century...
...Cecil Driver, Tory Radical: The Life of Richard Oastter...
...Less than one-eighth of this increase went to national defense...
...Since this is not a full book, it should be read in conjunction with Robert A. Nisbet, "Rousseau and the Political Community" in his collection, Tradition & Revolt...
...Author of The Enterprising Americans and Farewell to Reform...
...For insight into another department of our unsatisfactory existense, turn to Theodore Caplow's definitive statement of the reasons why programs of social betterment fail of their object and waste our money...
...He reconstructs with consummate skill the best unsolved murder of our century--best, because it is as full of clues and limiting factors as any contrived tale, because the large cast of characters (including the police and the law men) is remarkable, and because the case has aroused conflicting passions in the notable literature published about it during the last forty years...
...Edmund Burke: An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs, ditto...
...The artful, moving recollections of a girl whose growing up consisted in discovering what it meant to be Ezra Pound's daughter...
...All Russia is divided into three environments, that of the Gulag Archipelago, that of the people, and that of the elite who live, dine, and wine off the people...
...Caplow, as his other works demonstrate, is unique among sociologists in being a highly cultivated mind and a superb writer--witness the chapter in Two Against One (1968) where he applies to Hamlet his understanding of human alliances...
...Why living things have the shape and structure they have...
...If one includes the expenditures of all levels of government, the figures become even more astonishing...
...Moss, the foreign editor of the London Economist, beats his brains out in the forlorn hope of persuading people that democracy is as democracy does...
...No wonder Freeman concludes that a "revolution" in public spending has transpired and that "the nature of the federal government underwent its most significant change ever between 1952 and 1972...
...Communists and their crypto friends are all for it until they get power--and pouf...
...Author (with Alien Tate and Mark Van Doren) of Invitation to Learning, editor of The Limits of Art and (with Edith Hamilton) Plato: The Collected Dialogues...
...Instead, the truly noteworthy proliferation of government since the Korean War has occurred among states and localities...
...In the middle decades of the twentieth century', America has seen the explosive emergence of the welfare state--probably "the most significant govermnental development of its time...
...Author of The House of Intellect...
...Understanding Oriental Philosophy, by James K. Feibleman...
...Since 1950 or so I've possessed those volumes, though I began reading them in the Central Library on 42nd back in 1916...
...one sees its power in the movies (Bonnie and Clyde), in politics (left and right wing politics), and in a dozen new religious gnosticisms (human potential, est, etc...
...tuthor of A Nation of Behavers...
...Bleak House...
...However flawed technically, this is the finest novel about the human condition...
...For dramatic and suspenseful fiction, for high drama and incisive and profound characterization, for tightly knit structure and r.arrative power with a hundred thousand volts of electricity, there is still nothing like the fiction of Stefan Zweig...
...And the picture of these years that emerges is a truly different one from the conventional wisdom--a frightening one, a sobering one, a deeply convincing one...
...This hefty (648 page) introduction to the main Ortegan themes did not receive the notice it deserved five years ago...
...Denis de Rougemo~t's Love in the ~1estern World taught mr: :o recognize--in myself, first of all--a peculiar Western moralism that would prefer to die for impossible ideals, rather th-',n to accept the world of flesh and blood, in realism and in love...
...or the last year or so I have been reading ;rench writers, possibly because I admire heir lack of sentimentality...
...The Gulag Archipelago by Alexander Solzhenitsyn...
...The Russians by Hedrick Smith...
...ROBERT N. BELLAH Chairman, Center for Japanese and Korean Studies, University of California, Berkeley...
...SAUL BELLOW Professor of English in the Committee on Social Thought, University of Chicago...
...compassion and truth...
...despair, hope, and survival...
...It is also beautifully written...
...the last one, are worth reading, and worth reading carefully...
...Norman B. Ture: Tax Policy, Capital Formation and Productivity (1973), to understand America's most pressing immediate problem...
...The only outstanding book--or books--is the ten-volume edition, somewhat bowdlerized, alas...
...Classic, Romantic, and Modern...
...A remarkable exercise for the willing reader, exhilarating, healing...
...Hedrick Smith's account of the second and third of these environments is as depressingly accurate as it is remarkable...
...This volume is currently out of print, but is well worth searching for...
...Finally Charles Dickens by Edgar Johnson is about the man and one of the great periods of the expanding West...
...one only wishes he had lived to write more...
...Another first-rate book for 1976--and for years to come--is George Nash's The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America since 1945...
...The reading of only a few pages is enough to convince one that Zweig outclasses almost every other story-writer of the twentieth century...
...Still, for anybody who wants to understand the inundation of America's own tradition of social thought by what can only be called t h e " second wave of pseudopuritanism," this is an important book-both for what Professor Hughes (formerly at Harvard and now at University of California at San Diego) sees, and what he fails to see...
...This myth is deep, tenacious, and difficult to exorcise...
...Werner Jaeger's Paedeia is the classic work on Greek civilization as it was apprehended through literature and philosophy...
...JOHN CHAMBERLAIN Syndicated columnist, King Features Syndicate...
...In an election year replete with cries about tax reform, Freeman's discussion of this topic is apt and instructive...
...For their contemporary manifestation see Robert Moss's The Collapse of Democracy...
...In 1952 the federal government already disbursed 13.4 billion dollars for domestic services...
...The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science by E.A...
...The most interesting literary project of this bicentennial period is Otto Scott's biographical recreation of the fools of history --assorted jackasses, if you like--who have had such a malign effect both in their lifetimes and beyond...
...History of the Peloponnesian War, by Thucydides...
...Lukacs has the great advantage of not having been an adult during that period, so that he can look at it as a historian--as against, for instance, my attempt to do the same job in my book The End of Economic Man (which was written in 1938 and published in 1939 and, therefore, is "eyewitness" rather than "history...
...JOHN HOSPERS Professor of Philosophy, University of Southern California...
...Today the figure approaches 40 % and does not cease to climb...
...But there is laughter there and tears...
...Surprisingly enough, this has not been the case: federal spending and employment have not been exceeding the growth of the nation's economy since 1952...
...Finally, my favorite philosophical work, Bernard Lonergan's Insight: A Study of Human Understanding--difficult, abstruse, but liberating...
...Gamalis and Other Stories by Vladimir Andreyev...
...Freeman begins by refuting a plausible but erroneous notion: that the federal bureaucracy and its expenditures have been expanding at an unusual rate in the past quarter of a century...
...Author of Making It...
...P.G...
...Freeman amasses a startling array of statistics to documenthis case...
...Two things grow clear as this book enters its sixth decade: it presents us with new aspects of interest approximately every ten years, and it has displaced Paradise Lost as the book which all subsequent books in English take for granted...
...Roger Lea MacBride), a series of informal letters (never intended for publication) by one of the great champions of liberty in America--posthumously published letters on every conceivable subject, but especially on political philosophy and history...
...The Sea Change...
...Author of Beyond Belief and editor (with William G. McLoughlin) of Religion in America...
...The Republic, by Plato...
...Too bad that is not the end of it...
...It is appropriate that he do so, for governmental taxation, like governmental expenditures, now approximates a remarkable 40% of the GNP...
...There is, in short, no peaceful road to socialism...
...He confused statecraft with ministering to his own comforts...
...NORMAN PODHORETZ Editor, Commentary...
...The share of the Gross National Product expended for national defense and international relations has declined steeply from 14.3% in 1952 to less than 7% today --the lowest !eve1 s~nce the 1930s...
...The tides come in, the tides go out...
...But if, as Freeman states, "the growth of government as such" has not been the significant transformation of recent times, what, then, constitutes the "revolution...
...A novel which incorporates a design for a universe as radically unsatisfactory as the author in his blacker moods felt this one to be, but with its logic somewhat closer to the surface...
...Perhaps the finest preaching of the twentieth century is contained in the three volumes of sermons by Paul Tillich: The Shaking of the Foundations, The New Being, and The Eternal Now...
...Author of America in the Sixties: An Intellectual History and editor of Twentieth Century Interpretations of Henry the Fifth...
...But Howe's portrayal of the life if Jewish immigrants to American cities ~pened for many of us goyim a window on L mysterious and remote world...
...Atlas of Early American History: The ~evolutionary Era 1760-1790, edited by .ester J. Cappon, Barbara Bartz Petchenik and John H. Long, is a magnificent achievement...
...and The Use and Abuse of Art...
...Don't read women's lib--read Emma...
...Growth and Form, by D'Arcy W. Thompson (2 vols...
...Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics should be read as an example of how social science should be done...
...It relents only after death, so great is our longing for escape from flesh, and concrete reality, and imperfection...
...Goodman, I may say with confidence, has produced the classic account: thorough but never tedious, scholarly yet original, vivid though sober in tone--altogether satisfying as history and entertainment...
...JAMES T. FARRELL Author of The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan...
...In doing so, we hope to provide not only useful advice, but also some insight into the working s and frolics of eig h teen extraordinary minds...
...perhaps the greatest volume in the Oxford History of Literature...
...Another, Dostoevsky's The Idiot--that premature Christ who involves self and others in destruction, with the sweetest and most innocent of motives...
...GEORGE F. WILL Syndicated columnist, Washington Post and Newsweek...
...Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, 1976...
...the story, of the Dodgers in Brooklyn and Los Angeles...
...Still the best single work on international politics as well as the most perceptive treatment available of what happens when class interest replaces the public interest within the polity...
...In contrast to Rossiter's book, Hughes thinks in jargon and writes in jargon--but this fits his subject admirably...
...I recommend these not because they are the best in their particular field (although some are) but because they open up a field or summarize an historical period...
...Emma...
...Author of Libertariarfism, Introduction to Philosophical Analysis, Human Conduct, and Artistic Expression...
...it is a book full of political lessons for serious persons, East and West...
...The Dodgers by Tommy Holmes...
...An examination of an especially noble conservatism...
...When travelng among politicians or custodians of the ~merican conscience, I bring with me at east one of the following volumes, all of hem available in the Penguin Classics and dl of them contemporary with last week's nomentous event in Washington or New (ork: vlontaigne, Essays )enis Diderot, Rameau's Nephew Toltaire, Philosophical Dictionary ~alzac, Lost Illusions ~laubert, Sentimental Education...
...Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan, though brilliant and deeply instructive about the modern mind, should be read as an example of how not to do social science...
...An excellent supplement to Solzhenitsyn's more ambitious work...
...Along the way, some books were milestones to me, just when I needed them...
...A self-portrait by a civilized man who sought to find the answers to the chief problems facing the individual: to grasp the nature of the world and the nature of the good life...
...In 1952, at the height of the Korean War, defense spending accounted for two-thirds of the federal budget...
...The moral: never give a Marxist a break when he comes talking about democracy...
...It is a book about the traits that make--or at least made-America unique and capable of surviving...
...Bleak House surely gives the lie to all the conventional ideas about the "Victorian Age"--but there is also love in Bleak House, and courage...
...and each year I fred passages that none of his biographers has ever properly noted--which wipe out the standard portrait of Emerson, the benign optimist, the unworldly transcendentalist...
...wise, scintillating, immensely provocative and even profound, but always beautifully readable, and a fascinating revelation of the mind of one of America' s most remarkable women...
...At the same time, Lukacs is free from the burden of "proving" the "liberal" or the "conservative" position...
...By the way, in this day of overpriced books, this one is not overpriced considering the effort and value of the product...
...He observes, for example, that despite all the inveighing agaln-~t tax "loopholes," most tax-free income in the United States resides in the George H. Nash, author of The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America since' 1945, fir currently writing a biography of Herbert Hoover...
...Conservatism in America...
...the price goes from $100 to $125 after Christmas, so recommendations at this time are appropriate...
...The Alternative: An American Spectator December 1976 21 More seriously perhaps, he leaves out the equally important "migration," that of Europeans who, as a result of their exposure to America, became better thinkers, cleaner thinkers, and more responsible...
...Persons and Places, by George Santayana...
...Between 1952 and 1972 the portion of the federal budget allocated to defense was reduced by one-half, while the portion devoted to domestic services tripled...
...It is a successful attempt to report and analyze the crucial years before Pearl Harbor, without the ideological blinkers that characterize much of the writings about the period...
...For his subject is the migration of the assorted sociologists, psychoanalysts, and nihilists from Europe to the United States, and their impact on American social thought, or at least social jargon...
...Roger Freeman-Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, adviser to Presidents, and authority on public finance--believes that the United States has witnessed "nothing less than a revolution in the nature of government" during the last twenty-five years...
...the reader will probably be too busy thinking to bother about classifying the author...
...James Stuart had a great tutor, George Buchanan, whose Madisonian theories of the separation of church and state might have saved England from revolution if James had not been perverse in every way...
...MICHAEL NOVAK Professor of Religion, University of Syracuse...
...r/orld of Our Fathers, by Irving Howe, mrdly needs more publicity than it 'eceived...
...For its hard-headed treatment of the "self" in American life, an exposition to contrast with contemporary pseudopsychological efforts at self-discovery...
...In 1932, while President Hoover was still in orifice, total governmental expenditures (at all levels) comprised less than 20% of the Gross National Product...
...A wide ranging treatment of the nonpolitical aspects of life in the development of American society...
...PETER F. DRUCKER Clarke Professor of Social Science and Management, Claremont University...
...but it is a splendid 20 The Alternative: An American Spectator December 1976 show...
...JACQUES BARZUN Professor Emeritus, Columbia University...
...LEWIS MUMFORD Author o f Technics and Civilization, The City in History, and The Myth of the Machine...
Vol. 10 • December 1976 • No. 3
