Christmas Book Recommendations
Baltzell, E. Digby
"Christmas Book Recommendations" This ceaseless transformations of personality (which merely prove to him over and over again that he does not know who he is), finally is converted into an object, a jute sack covered by layers and...
...Finally, to appreciate fully the range and depth of this warm-hearted man who was, in my mind, the best historian of his times, read his autobiography, which about ruined his reputation because of its candor, especially its revelation that he was a professional who wrote for money...
...A voice...
...a very humane collection...
...Under Western Eyes, by Joseph Conrad...
...Recent and fascinating is Stephen Knight's Jack the Ripper—The Final Solution (McKay...
...author of Adolf Hitler and The Rising Sun...
...Part II, books which I have enjoyed reading this year...
...for all the mastery and glorification of technique, language as a game finally becomes boring...
...I can't help wondering whether his fictional hero Wintergrin is partly based on someone I admire in real life: Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn...
...Beautiful, wise, and with-out preaching, it shows how les extremes (far left, far right) se touchent...
...Those whom the gods loathed will live to see the effects of this War...
...Isaac Babel once said that a properly placed exclamation point is like a knife driven into the reader's heart: In Beerbohm's prose, nearly everything is of that order of artistic magnitude...
...A work of art, and an insight into some of today's most brutal mischief-makers...
...Norton & Company, 1977...
...and The Way We Live Now nears the peak of Trollope's achievements in its relentless, fascinating attack upon all kinds of dis18 The American Spectator December 1978 honesty...
...E. DIGBY BALTZELL Professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania...
...1. The Way the World Works, by Jude Wanniski—the Laffer Curve replaces the Phillips Curve, or Entrepreneurial Capital-ism revisited...
...Then take a look into the lesser-known works of Anthony Trollope...
...Three Trapped Tigers is a better book and is rather fun to read, composed as it is of theatrical puns, jokes, and hundreds of word plays...
...L'Assommoir was denounced by the French intellectual left for presenting the Paris working class not merely as poor but honest victims of the industrial economy but also as fools and slovens happily demolishing or corrupting their own best opportunities...
...This is what Marvin R. O'Connell does superbly in The Oxford Conspirators —The History of the Oxford Movement: 1833-1845 (Macmillan, 1969...
...Gould's special gift to be able to illuminate often complex scientific ideas with a special blend of erudition, wit, and clarity of expression...
...He is not generally regarded to be a major writer, nor did he think of himself as one...
...Sparrow, a scholar, lawyer, and essayist, takes up the Warren Commission Report and its critics and in 75 brilliant pages shows what the rational view of "random" events is...
...And he writes of them and of other subjects like a man whose goal is not simply "findings" but understanding...
...Some things that are old, then some that are new...
...Now, after reading four of his novels, I regard him as one of the great virtuosi of the medium...
...Well, Mr...
...And of the numerous errors on this large subject perhaps the most tiresome is that which says that Rousseau's Social Contract is "the charter of totalitarian government...
...Cobra's deliberately disordered structure is made noclearer by knowing that Sarduy is obsessed with language itself as the ultimate (?) reality...
...Then, William Buckley's Saving The Queen, which is a delight...
...they prefer conspiracy to probability, and there-by show how little they know about life...
...He manages even to show one irrationality of the conspiracy theorists: They do not deal with the evidence fairly and systematically...
...My Christmas list has two parts: Part I, books which I keep around for reference or inspiration...
...A novel of the lower depths, all right, but extremely funny and written throughout in the rhetoric of prole slang...
...Whittaker Chambers' magnificent Witness (1952) is just out in a paper-back edition by Gateway...
...It should be forced on anyone who believes that...
...his style, sheer perfection...
...These are required readings for all who try to understand world politics...
...In the midst of World War II he jotted down in his notebook the following observations: Those whom the gods loved died in July, 1914.Those whom the gods liked died very soon after Armistice Day, in November, 1918...
...Iinclude this novelization of the Battle of Gettysburg as simply the piece of fiction that has given me the greatest pleasure during the past ten years...
...From my view, Adams in the long run had the greater half-truth than his dear friend Jefferson did, and it is my guess that he will come into his own in the next decade...
...The hermetic and arcane language in books such as Lezama Lima's Paradiso, Sarduy's Cobra, and even Cabrera Infante's Three Trapped Tigers often obscures meaning, and thus requires "deciphering...
...The Latin American novelist, like his modern predecessors, has changed the rules, has thrown out the idea that the universe possesses meaning...
...The best presidential autobiography since Grant's...
...Anyone who grapples with English syntax day in and day out cannot but be overwhelmed by his uncanny choice of words, by the elegant yet never artificial rhythm of his prose, by his sense of composition...
...He is one of the world's profoundest psychologists of history (read also his Last European War), which is not the same as a psycho-historian (again: less modish...
...Orley Farm a devastating study of morality...
...And now three older books having this in common: They miraculously make their fantasies more convincingly real than reality...
...literary advisor of Charles Scribner's Sons...
...EUGENE J. McCARTHY Former U.S...
...The reader understands that the questions of homosexuality and of the writer's creativity provide the mainspring to Paradiso, and that transvestism (an image for the metamorphosis of personality...
...I have recently developed a passion for Max Beerbohm...
...author of Philadelphia Gentlemen and The Protestant Establishment...
...I don't remember reading a line of Zola until last year, when I read Therese Raquin (and promptly advertised the fact in these pages in December...
...JACQUES BARZUN University Professor Emeritus at Columbia University...
...Hardly any of Beerbohm's writings are in print today, which forced me to under-take (against Beerbohm's advice) a collection of his first editions...
...A welcome relief from almost everything and everyone, including other humorists and their works and pomps...
...It is Mr...
...It is hard for me to believe that James M. Cain did not read La Bete Humaine (and Therese Raquin) before writing The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity, even though Cain's biographer, Roy Hoopes, tells me he has found no evidence of it in Cain's notes and letters...
...It is a collection of elegant, highly literate essays which are worth reading for style alone...
...The fact is that Darwinism is very much alive...
...one rich in story and carrying a full cargo of three dimensional characters, including heroes and heroines with whom you can empathize...
...Those whom the gods hated lived to see the War's effects...
...Representative from New York...
...Buckley, but it's his novel I'm here to praise...
...his ceaseless transformations of personality (which merely prove to him over and over again that he does not know who he is), finally is converted into an object, a jute sack covered by layers and layers of more sacking...
...author of Radical Chic, The Painted Word, Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine, and The Right Stuff (forthcoming...
...I agree with Churchill, who said it is a good thing for an uneducated man to have a book of quotations...
...The Pursuit of Happiness and Other Sobering Thoughts, by George F. Will: In his precise and graceful way—a rapier handled by a gentleman—George Will demonstrates that common sense allied to an uncommon sensibility can produce the best libertarian commentary on our times...
...3. Two Cheers for Capitalism, by Irving Kristol—enough said...
...The Liberal Mind, by Kenneth Minogue...
...Paul Valery's History and Politics is my favorite escape reading in my dour discipline, serving to reassure me that political science can be both civilized and stimulating...
...All are not only highly enjoyable (my first criterion) but instructive (my next) and when I finish any one of them I feel pleased and rewarded, not as if I had eaten a dozen candy bars...
...For the reader working under the old set of rules, the traditional cultural context of Western society, the piecemeal voices of dialogue, inner- and outer-directed monologues, theater, singing, and just plain talk, talk, talk, do not cohere because there is no ordering principle to the universe...
...The many neo-baroque metaphors in Paradiso require still more keys after the first key...
...WILLIAM A. RUSHER Publisher of National Review...
...The most imaginative of all science-fiction writers, Dick is quoted as such in my forthcoming new poetry book, Applewood, and specializes in alternative universes...
...5. My list began with the Oxford "conspirators" of 150 years ago...
...Only an idiot or a lout would read it and fail to note its historical importance...
...The Killer Angels, by Michael Shaara...
...author of Unadjusted Man, Conservatism Revisited, Conservatism from John Adams to Churchill, and Shame & Glory of the Intellectuals, as well as a Pulitzer Prize-winning book ofpoetry, Terror & Decorum...
...Then there are Aesop's Fables...
...The Man Who Was Thursday, by G.K...
...John P. Frayne, Columbia University Press, 1978) has it been possible to gauge the amount of thought Yeats put into the battle for Irish culture—a battle fought on two fronts, Irish and English, for in such matters compatriots are not automatically friends...
...As a bonus, de Solla Price presents his own research on the history of celestial clocks with a liveliness that gives this arcane topic momentary parity with molecular biology and astrophysics...
...It's great stuff...
...The connection between a great novel or essay and a historical source is very intimate because, ultimately, both kinds of literature help to illuminate life's mysteries...
...I do not consciously distinguish this kind of reading ("re-search") from reading for pleasure, inasmuch as trying to cope with life's problems is for me the highest form of pleasure...
...Chinese Shadows, by Simon Leys: A gentle but powerful antidote to the soothing syrup of the "See China Now" ads...
...Nana...
...Jake's Thing, by Kingsley Amis: Every-thing you ever hoped the author of Lucky Jim might have to say about the relations between men and women, and the ludicrous trade of sex therapy...
...Chekhov, Rilke, and William James, to mention but a few, have profoundly influenced the way I perceive the world and, therefore, write history...
...His best essays have no superior in the English language: Among them I would include almost all the essays from And Even Now (e.g., "Quia Imperfectum"), and such masterpieces as "Enoch Soames" and the parodies in The Christmas Garland...
...Perhaps that is part of the explanation: Beerbohm's minor master-pieces are invidiously exciting...
...Incidentally, Beerbohm's style seems to me possibly to have served as a model for Vladimir Nabokov, although I know nothing positive of the influence of the one writer on the other...
...In my school years I had somehow formed the impression that Zola was the earnest hard-slogging naturalist of the lower depths, "the French Dreiser," and I had had about enough of the American one...
...The American Spectator December 1978 19...
...In addition to the books mentioned above, I plan to give, as gifts, two of my own books...
...Here Zola pulls off what I regard as an absolutely dazzling technical feat...
...This is a book on modern philosophers and is good reading to clear the mind, not only of philosophers, but of teachers, editors, politicians, of everyone who has responsibility for applying ideas, either in criticism or in action, in our civilization...
...And here the historian brings us unpublished material that modifies still further the conventional image one so readily takes for reality...
...RICHARD PIPES Professor of history, Harvard University...
...Language in these novels prevents us from gathering a coherent vision of the universe because it is language itself which creates the disorder...
...Cole Everyman edition, to take up Rousseau's two practical recommendations, for the government of Poland and for the government of Corsica...
...And given his own creativeness and the magnitude of his subject, he cannot help capturing a special quality of the scientific spirit: "The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy...
...Even better, it raises unanswerable moral questions of ends and means...
...1. It has been said that nothing ages so fast into dullness as religious quarrels...
...if so, I amhonored to have my O'Brien cult confirmed by an authority whom I so much respect...
...Knight, a London reporter, convinced me that he does...
...The Congress is still looking for conspirators fifteen years after President Kennedy's death, urged to that exercise by the persistent demand of publicists and others who cannot accept madness and chance in historical events...
...Nana's child-hood is depicted in L'Assommoir, as is the family taint of madness—Zola believed in the taint—that shows up in Nana's brother Jacques in La Bete Humaine...
...and anyone interested in sampling the world of current speculation in the field of natural history can do no better than browse through Stephen Jay Gould's Ever Since Darwin (W.W...
...Much of their critique of the environmental movement can only be described as embarrassing, and the often-made assertion that Darwinism has been "disproved" is simply ignorant...
...La Bete Humaine...
...O'Brien's section on bicycles seems the funniest as well as the most fantastic spoof ever written...
...For me, nearly every reference to Rousseau is the cause of such irritation...
...author of The Making of the New Majority Party...
...Eastward Ha!, by S.J...
...JAMES L. BUCKLEY Former U.S...
...and, again, writing itself inform the world of Cobra, but what of it...
...I find it intelligent, well written, and a "good read...
...John Henry Newman dominates the scene less than one would sup-pose, true history being always a return to the original perspective at the expense of hindsight...
...But as Beerbohm has cautioned in another connection, "mental ability is not safely gauged by height or depth of topic...
...Being deaf, blind, dumb, a small sexless package," he is reduced to a thing...
...Bartlett's Familiar Quotations is indispensable...
...Endlessly challenging because Lukacs tells it not like it is but (less modish) as it is...
...The second is A Political Bestiary (McGraw-Hill), written by James J. Kilpatrick and myself with illustrations by the noted cartoonist, Jeff MacNelly...
...The editing that makes these two large volumes ideally intelligible is beyond praise...
...It is not surprising that he might suspect the old shell game...
...They were generously fulfilled...
...Into That Darkness: From Mercy Killing to Mass Murder, by Gitta Sereny: A wonderfully patient, clinical but humane probe into the life and mind of the commandant of the Treblinka extermination camp...
...As far as current reading goes, I have a few odd favorites...
...Senator from Minnesota...
...I can tell you: It doesn't help a bit...
...I suspect that if Leibenstein and his colleagues succeed, economics will become a far more precise—and interesting—subject...
...Stained Glass, by William F. Buckley, Jr...
...The Third Policeman, by Flann O'Brien...
...Was it Victoria's grandson, the Duke of Clarence...
...JOHN TOLAND Historian...
...I read belletristic works to gain depth and improve my style...
...so read it to ponder as well as enjoy...
...Chekhov, Trollope managed to carry on two successful careers...
...Abundant with information and revelations of error...
...I've also been reading Leon Feuchtwanger's Success (Erfolg), about manners and morals in Munich around the time of Hitler's beer hall putsch...
...It's riveting!—a point not lost on the moviemakers: there's never been a bad train movie...
...Chesteron...
...It is very helpful on occasions when I am stonewalled by a difficult problem of thinking...
...It is, on the contrary, an abstract of all government and hence a guide to thought about its infinite varieties...
...He presents both a detailed portrait of a woman and a tableau of le beau monde of the Second Empire in fourteen consecutive crowd scenes...
...2. The opposite movement, away from the contemporary, is also valuable: Greatness in men may paradoxically increase with distance...
...Are you hankering for the old-fashioned, true life, lengthy novel...
...Beerbohm had the misfortune to outlive his generation...
...Population growth must fall behind the growth of knowledge, with consequences still only dimly foreseen...
...16 The American Spectator December 1978 A by-product of following Yeats through his book reviews and letters to the press is the discovery of his power as a day-to-day critic and prose writer—a new and different figure from the writer of autobiographies and love letters...
...The very best book on a historic question that became a question only because large numbers of profs believed that that which is obvious must be an illusion...
...Written in 1890, this will strike most readers as a very modern novel, I think, in its use of suspense, which dangles murder and lust from the outset, and in the author's portrayal of terrible faults in even his most sympathetic characters...
...Beerbohm was an aesthete, which means that he preferred to ignore every-thing sordid and evil, and to seek refuge in fantasy and humor...
...Science since Babylon, enlarged edition, by Derek de Solla Price...
...Perelman...
...PAUL SEABURY Professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley...
...The generality is disproved every time a historian has the talent to recreate the milieu, the emotions, and the men who fought...
...Both Paradiso and Cobra are governed by poetic images whose ultimate secret can only be decoded by the novelists them-selves...
...The First Three Minutes, by Steven Weinberg...
...Part II...
...Unlike Solzhenitsyn, who has passed through the crucible of isolation, brutality, and chaos and recovered the whole man in his writing, these artists cannot see beyond man's dehumanization and irremediable sense of isolation in a meaning-less, absurd universe...
...L'Assommoir...
...Conservatives tend to distinguish them-selves by their political and economic wisdom—and, alas, by their appalling biological illiteracy...
...Among living American poets, the grand master, who said "the words of the poet are spoken for man alone...
...His ideas, his myth-making, his politics, and his love affairs have been well reported on for some time, but not until the appearance of his Uncollected Prose in two volumes (ed...
...Today's biologists have developed some intriguing theories explaining many of the most puzzling biological phenomena...
...In this brief and stimulating exposition of the scientific study of science, the author explains why knowledge has expanded too fast for the scientific academy to keep up with it...
...Only words...
...He was a conscientious postal official who was largely responsible for, among other reforms, the mail box...
...Delightful is the word for The Belton Estate which possesses one of literature's most engaging heroes...
...But for all his virtuosity with language, Cabrera Infante's language is no less obscure...
...It is obvious that the reader will find himself in terrible difficulties with books of this sort precisely because there is no coherence of content...
...Zola helped create such simple-minded notions among the bystanders, incidentally, by continually theorizing about his own work...
...Economics is just a gigantic accounting scheme, the predictive power of which depends on the comprehensiveness of its mathematical models...
...This was fifty years before CeIine...
...2. The Story of Civilization, by Will Durant—must be read by every generation of Americans to understand the role of incentive in the rise and fall of civilizations...
...It is a delightful analysis of the greatest friend-ship in American history...
...R. EMMETT TYRRELL, JR...
...of A Generation on Trial, Alistair Cooke's America, and Six Men...
...TOM WOLFE Journalist...
...The Collected Works of Allen Tate...
...The U.S...
...This is surely true of Yeats, the last of the large-scale poets...
...Besides the acclaimed Barsetshire and Political (or Palliser) Novels—six in each series—he wrote over fifty other books...
...The Man in the High Castle, by Philip K. Dick...
...For those back-sliding into either religious or secular Manichaeanism, I recommend Vilma Fritsch's Left and Right in Science and Life...
...In Chinese Shadows by Simon Leys (Viking), an essentially apolitical connoisseur of Chinese culture reports on his visits to the mainland—and turns in an indictment of Communist China so withering it will make Hua Kuo-feng lose his won-tons...
...But I like them both asprimers in political prudence...
...and the Origins of the Cold War, by John Lewis Gaddis...
...Unfortunately, I am rushing to finish a book and have not been doing much reading this year...
...I am not sure I could explain why if I tried...
...They touch on a wide variety of topics which together give the reader fascinating insights into modern evolutionary thinking...
...But even if he does find out where the pea is, it is still only a dried-up, little pea...
...Most of these are little read but of high quality and marvelously varied...
...Need I point out the acute similarity between this monstrous dehumanization and the garbage-can existence of Beckett's characters in End Game...
...EDWARD O. WILSON Professor of zoology and curator of entomology at Harvard University...
...Christmas Book Recommendations We offer here gift suggestions from some of the writers and statesmen whose books and collected utterances would top our own list of recommendations...
...No, but you're warm...
...PETER VIERECK Poet and historian...
...Did you think we'd never know the identity and motive of the fiendish Ripper...
...author of The Insect Societies, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, and On Human Nature...
...Then return to the Social Contract and if you must utter about it, don't talk about social-contract theory as if Rousseau had invented it and don't echo the thought-cliche about—you know what...
...Nothing that I have read this year has given me more pleasure than three novels by Zola: La Bete Humaine, Nana, and L 'Assommoir...
...To grasp its full meaning it may be well, after one reading in the G.D.H...
...a wall of silence is constructed between him/it and the rest of humanity...
...Like Dr...
...I picked up a second-hand Penguin because it was called Contrary Imaginations...
...More importantly, by removing man from his sense of history and chronological time, by fragmenting his personality so that it loses wholeness and individuality, by sewing him up in a sack of solitariness, the Latin American novelist has destroyed the sense of community so critical to literature in general and fiction in particular...
...I still can't see why economic Manchester liberalism (rootless, materialistic, atomizing) should ever be deemed "conservative" (which means a rooted, organic continuity) by Mr...
...In such a mood it is wise to read or reread John Sparrow's After the Assassination (Chil-mark Press, 1967...
...Leibenstein reminds us that nonrational human behavior is a major neglected element...
...The Illusion of Technique, by William Barrett...
...4. Taking Sides, by Richard Whalen—one of the best written and most important political books of the twentieth century...
...In Defense of the Public Liberty, by Samuel B. Griffith II: After all the patriotic hullabaloo about the Bicentennial, this splendid and grossly ignored book by a retired Marine general is simply the finest work anyone has done—from Trevelyan on—about the complexity of the relations between London and the Colonies from 1760 to Yorktown...
...Part I. Burke's Works and Gibbon's Decline and Fall...
...3. A good title is a precious aid to author and reader both...
...RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon...
...Montaigne probably has done more to shape my historical and political views than any historical monograph that I have ever read...
...Most American Spectator readers, I suppose, need no explanation for such a preference...
...The other day I learned, however, that one-half of Americans never read a book, and of the others, the book readers, a good proportion use reading as a soporific...
...I love both men but the beauty of the book is that it gives one great insight into the optimistic and pessimistic aspects of our heritage: The popular Jefferson, as Macaulay would have put it, was "all sail" when it came to equality and democracy with a capital "D," while the unpopular Adams saw that even Democrats were subject to sin and needed an "anchor...
...The story of those twelve years is full of lessons in party and personal politics...
...A useful explanation of the fevers of the so-called liberals...
...Finally, the Book of Common Prayer—the Episcopalian's bible...
...Only conspiracy seems to them a rational explanation...
...I spend most of my working life reading, mainly sources, primary and secondary, for the histories I write...
...It is but one sign of his originality that he took the trouble to come to know by face and character hundreds of boys he tested at various schools...
...The first is America Revisited (Doubleday), a study of American institutions against a background' of Alexis de Tocqueville's observations made 150 years The American Spectator December 1978 17 ago...
...Another stand-by is Auden's A Certain World, a scrapbook anthology of writings organized by subject matter (e.g., Dogs, Humility, Purple Prose, Sin, etc...
...Finally, invest forty dollars in The Jerome Biblical Commentary, a magnificent, superbly scholarly, endlessly fascinating analysis of the Bible—often almost line by line...
...I do not know why he is not read...
...The psychological study is professional and as exact as the current testing devices permit, but it transcends the typology of school-boys through the author's philosophic mind, wide culture, and unfailing knack of turning a fact or a rule into a means of critically reassessing an entire realm—society, the school, science, and professional psychology itself...
...in character, statism, and university life...
...Beyond Economic Man, by Harvey Leibenstein...
...author of Russia Under the Old Regime...
...JACK KEMP U.S...
...However, I was tremendously impressed with a short little paperback, Adams and Jefferson, a Revolutionary Dialogue (Merrill D. Peterson, Oxford University Press, 1976...
...In doing so, we hope to provide not only useful advice, but also some insight into the workings and frolics of fourteen extraordinary minds...
...author of The House of Intellect and Clio and the Doctors...
...Our own conspirators today are far more numerous, being nearly all supposed or imagined...
...La Bete Humaine must also be one of the first novels, if not the first, to use moving trains as the locus of the major action...
...Published in 1976 by Prentice-Hall, it bears the imprimatur of a Roman Catholic bishop, but it has been hailed by scholars of many faiths and none...
...Senator from New York...
...If only man exists and he is miniaturized, like the white-dwarf version of Cobra in Sarduy's novel, if his deeds are mocked and his world shorn of significance, then what is left...
...Ayala's Angel is a piercing social comedy...
...authc...
...I might have been deterred by the explanatory words: "A Psychological Study of the English Schoolboy," but I had seen Liam Hudson's name at the head of first-rate book reviews in the TLS, so I paid my fifty cents, in hopes...
...A colleague says Hugh Kenner has already once listed this as a Christmas book...
...ALISTAIR COOKE Host of "Masterpiece Theatre...
...4. In miscellaneous reading every professional is likely to be annoyed by the repetitious thought-cliches on a subject he knows to be widely different from the cliche...
...Just as the voices of Donoso's Mudito, Puig's Toto, and Vargas Llosa's Ambrosio and Santiago are isolated, sealed-up pieces of insubstantiality, so the novelists' language becomes, logically, increasingly insubstantial and secretive as it conveys the meaning (or meaninglessness) of the novelists' universe...
...then, George Kennan's From Prague to Munich—diplomatic dispatches which in a fastidious way tell what goes on in a country which has just been abandoned by its allies...
...he suggests how human nature might be incorporated into the main body of the theory...
...Finally, Somerset Maugham's Ashenden, Or, The British Agent—the best spy book of all...
...I have listed the three books in the order I wish I had read them...
...John Kenneth Galbraith did so...
...It is at once a searing autobiography, an introduction to Communism, a fascinating (and true) spy story, and an indispensable account of the case of the century—all in the luminous prose of one of America's finest writers...
...Not easy going but worth the effort, because Weinberg, one of our fore-most physicists, is here talking about the beginning of the universe according to the Big Bang theory, and therefore in a sense about everything...
...Further back, find and read A Roving Commission by Winston Churchill (publisherd in England under the title My Early Life): fond and lively memories of the great man's first 26 years, written in his forties solely to entertain...
...Belsen, Dachau, and the other chambers of horror were staffed entirely by bland monsters...
...It is also a must for left-handed people, who will gain comfort from it...
...Historical Consciousness, by John Lukacs...
...But here the reader runs into considerable difficulty...
...His world is bewitching...
...The value of the thing said depends not on the value of the thing it is said about...good sense about trivialities is better than nonsense about things that matter...
...I grant the book is difficult to master—so'clear and simple in statement and so searching in implication...
...in literature and the art of wriggling...
Vol. 11 • December 1978 • No. 12
