Table of Contents

...But one comes away understanding the drawbacks of the new phenomenon as well...

...These contradictions will not sort themselves out, just as New York will continue to enrapture the eye because of its own lunatic juxtapositions—of walk-ups and trade towers, terraced brownstones and skyscraping slivers...

...If it keeps her cholesterol slightly elevated, what's lost...

...Architectural preservation makes annoyed bedfellows of liberals and conservatives...

...Alcoholically limbered, his head took a pleasant spin upwards and, for the first time, he noticed that the station's tiny ceiling lights are in fact laid out as points in the northern constellations...

...Copies of this are now available...

...In the last twenty years New York, reacting with a delayed sense of shame, has been slower at self-amputation...

...I think my point is born out in the role played by the Vietnam conflict—through the Cambodian holocaust—in the minds of American youth...

...Anyone who lives here knows that Madison Square Garden has almost never been in Madison Square, because there was always a bigger buck to be had by moving the thing to another location...

...But in the hands of a Nor-man Mailer or a Tom Wolfe, impressionism becomes far more of a weapon: the author quotes his source verbatim and ad nauseam, but only to mock his grammar or breeding...

...Why not order reprints for your employees, shareholders, visiting consumer groups, and the press...

...Without doubt the comparison between the willingness of vast numbers of Germans to participate in Nazi society and "the willingness of so many well-meaning Americans" to condone by deliberate ignorance the basic evil of Soviet totalitarianism, will prove as patently offensive to the liberal-left as it is justified historically and, dare I say, morally...

...But we are also reminded that there is more to life than its duration, which specialized medicine often overlooks...

...I have often sat in dolorous wonderment at my peers' apparent gullibility on the history of Marxism-Leninism and Soviet aggression...

...with the unwitting aid of government regulatory agencies, have brought the nuclear power industry to its knees with a strategy of endless lawsuits, spurious health scares, and cynical media manipulation—all in the name of promoting a safe energy policy...

...It gives the nay-sayers a chance to get a word in, without condescension or slighting their arguments...

...Loewenberg traces Hitler's clear-cut plans to liquidate the Jews as far back as 1922, and shows rather decisively that Hitler had developed an entire theology of Germanity based on the principle of blood (i.e., Germans were pure...

...McPhee's last collection of articles, Giving Good Weight, published in 1979, followed the same formula...

...Unfortunately, so do Zionists—albeit for different reasons...

...The locale of the piece is semi-rural Maine, where a number of idealistic doctors went to work beginning in the early 1970s...

...They were tedious and obscure, unlikely to make the Mesozoic Era appeal to anyone who didn't already spend his free time cracking rocks...

...The longest essay, "Heirs of General Practice," which details a trend toward the "new" medical specialty of family practice, is a paradigm of McPhee's best writing...

...Thirtynine-year-old female presents with a sore throat...

...The great redeeming irony of the story is that the old station died a "heroically useful death," as Mr...

...That's how New York is, and to stop that would be to make New York into another, lesser place...

...the willingness to think twice is already instinctive...

...Oppenheimer accepts Sebastian Haffner's argument that the "final solution" orders only came after Hitler "was convinced his war was lost...

...He quotes, without comment and often at great length, a number of conventional specialists who regard family medicine as a dangerous swindle, saying things like, "Family practitioners do not have anything special to offer patients beyond a mix of superficially developed clinical skills," and "They do not possess much of the implicit information about patients and their families to which they lay claim in their self-descriptions...

...This article originally appeared in the November 1985 issue of The American Spectator...

...We went out for dinner and had a few, and at the end of the evening were weaving through Grand Central station, which still stands (though never so magnificently as the old Penn Station did...

...Jews were a contaminant...

...Enclosed is $ NAME ADDRESS CITY STATE ZIP The American Spectator • P.O...

...But we are the most unfree when reality crushes down on us as it always does with the greatest weight when in the form of manifest evil...

...I eventually came to the conclusion that it was not a matter of in-credulity but of will...

...1.00 for one $ 8.00 for ten $ 16.00 for twenty-five $ 60.00 for one hundred $250.00 for five hundred ^ Please send me reprints of Rael Jean Isaac's "Games AntiNukes Play...

...Indeed, most of Hitler's more frank statements about his plans for the Jews occurred before the war broke out, and certainly many can be found in Mein Kampf...

...The famous Columbia professor (and a man of the left), Fritz Stern, has written a book to warn against the "politics of illiberalism" in Bismarckian Germany...

...Open Man," an update of the classic profile of Bill Bradley which was the first article McPhee published in the New Yorker, is inferior to these pieces, consisting of little more than what was fed into McPhee's tape recorder...

...CORRESPONDENCE (continued from page 9) then stresses American responsibility for the Cold War...

...Oppenheimer is correct in linking leftist Teutonophobia to a specific geopolitical agenda, the abandonment of Central Europe to the Red Army...

...A few months ago I said goodbye to a friend of mine, a native Iowan, who was leaving New York after a year teaching school here...

...and even the anti-German aspect of the post World War I Red Scare is all but ignored...

...Stern emphasizes the alleged connection between the German catastrophe and "illiberal" German attitudes, manifested through a patriarchal family structure and the strict upbringing of children...

...What do you do about the gorgeous particulars that get trampled under all the collective, kinetic magnificence...

...McPhee, on the other hand, truly approaches Christopher Isherwood's ideal of literary photography...

...In "Heirs of General Practice," a consensus does emerge: that the trend in question is democratic and healthy...

...He documents the mood of Reagan's America where no one else would think to look for it—in Alaska, northern Maine, and rural New Jersey instead of Silicon Valley and Washington...

...And where instinct is weak, the law takes over...

...OPKnh...

...It pierces that web of confusing complexities thrown up by the march of history and cuts a simple and straight line to the source of youthful energy, our natural emotion, optimism and fanaticism...

...liventynine-year-old female presents with lesions of genital herpes...

...A surprising number of these essays praise development of one kind or another...

...He gives all sides...

...In this intensive, thoroughly documented report, Rael Jean Isaac demonstrates how small-isbeautiful "public interest groups...

...Moreover, in Hitler's theology, a sacrifice was an absolute necessity, just as in the Old Testament...

...Doctor Jones says okay...

...When he chooses to express an opinion, it gains credibility from his respect for those who disagree...

...Riding the Boom Extension" celebrates the advent of the telephone in the farthest reaches of the Yukon, and "Ice Pond" glorifies Princeton physicist Theodore Taylor's bizarre air-conditioning scheme...

...Yet I would rather that my own peer group refer to Paul Johnson's excellent Modern Times and his chapter on the Weimar Republic which chronicles the shameful precedent provided by the ardent enthusiasm of university students on behalf of National Socialism...

...These dizzying works, part of a planned four-volume geologic survey of North America, projected exactly the opposite quality...

...In fact, my friend left for home the next morning by plane, because that's the way you go home these days, but it doesn't matter: he had an exit, however symbolic, from a There are those who like to say that John McPhee has lost it...

...he understands the need to accommodate development...

...You see how much she wanted a biscuit...

...He'd suffered a fairly common defeat at the city's hands, and after a broke, roach-ridden year, he was ready to call it quits...

...Those who think John McPhee is still living in the sixties should be reassured that he has adapted his love of nature to the 1980s...

...The two pieces on the bears of New Jersey also wear a little thin...

...the "purity of the blood" was the ultimate goal of Germany...

...Publishing a good anthology ought to imply weeding out pieces which aren't worth collecting...

...McPhee describes one poignant scene in a doctor's office where a 77-year-old woman comes asking for permission to eat her favorite foods—biscuits and ice cream...

...He portrays pioneering physicians who share a Norman Rockwellian vision of American medicine: doctors who are cheerily bringing large segments of the population the medical care they want, toting their black bags to make $25 house calls...

...For example, Hitler wanted to effect the "reconciliation of mankind...

...Paul Gottfried Chairman Department of History Rockford College Rockford, Illinois Mr...

...John's Review, Winter 1982...

...Ever since the thirties, when Eric Fromm and Theodor Adorno discovered the "authoritarian personality," critics of social constraint and sexual roles have found it useful to turn to the German case...

...Collective guilt offers an escape from reality that is especially appealing to youth...

...There is good news for those who left McPhee at the limestone quarry...

...Places like that, palaces en route, allowed the traveler to see his life in mythic terms for a minute or two, with the hopes higher, the disappointments more desperate...

...Oppenheimer's multi-book review on Germany's (collective) guilt for the crimes of World War II deserves the affirmation of reader understanding and approbation which he feared would not be forthcoming...

...And yet...

...The same kind of hate has been fanned and exploited to advance a liberal agenda at home...

...Much of the family practice piece adopts the log book form: "Thirty-two-year-old male presents with warts on his penis...

...beautiful place, however obsolescent...

...Thus McPhee can't be accused of only listening to doctors who are happy with their lives and patients who are happy with their doctors...

...As should be obvious from the topics, there is really no common thread to this anthology...

...We are, consequently, the freest when we are the most idealistic...

...The former find themselves battling to save grand old buildings from capitalist predation, deliberately forgetting that the grand old buildings were themselves once flung up by capitalist predators...

...Fran, %I...

...M RM Jnn Inge %,10, .11411101015 54 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1986...

...German,', cull, (wee...

...Conservatives want the market to work its will but still can't bear seeing the remnants of what they think was a more graceful culture bulldozed for yet more Plasticretins...

...Table of Contents reprints his last eight short pieces from the New Yorker, which has published practically everything he has written since 1963...

...It also helps to dispel some of the romanticism a lesser writer wouldn't be able to resist...

...McPhee ex-amines the careers of a dozen young physicians who, having become fed up with specialization and high tech in Jacob Weisberg is a reporter-researcher at the New Republic...

...It may surprise those who consider McPhee a knee-jerk supporter of environmental regulation that he takes his stand against "conservationists [who] hate dams, no matter how large they are...

...In this and other essays, McPhee returns to a couple of well-tried techniques, the police blotter and the Greek chorus...

...A number of writers identified withthe New Journalism—a term which fits McPhee not at all-have adopted these techniques...

...Nor is there an introduction, an index, drawings, or an imaginative title...

...The unfortunate answer is, very little, especially if you subscribe to the New Yorker...

...We as youth naturally want to make things better and to change, really, all of life towards some ideal that we are sure glows in ourown fresh, uncorrupted hearts and can-not be found in those who have learned to live with and accept the status quo...

...Lenin and Stalin are shown more sympathetically than Kaiser Wilhelm...

...We are acutely aware that the woman might live longer if she followed the advice of a specialist...

...It's the sort of thing they don't do in Burlington, Iowa, and I think that moment of unexpected awe on his last night in the city made up for a lot...

...Otherwise, I'm sure John McPhee would agree, it doesn't justify chopping down all those trees...

...What they mean is that McPhee, whose best writing has made environmental and scientific topics accessible to general readers, has grown increasingly exhaustive and esoteric of late...

...The timing of the actual orders was in fact inconsequential, as Robert Loewenberg shows in his article, "The Trivialization of the Holocaust as an Aspect of Modern Idolatry" (St...

...McPhee's range of topics—from hydroelectric power to the bears of New Jersey to Senator Bill Bradley—is typically astounding...

...Box 10448 • Arlington, VA 22210 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR Iknjamin J. Swein: Sc, War...

...I would like to add, however, a note on the particular vulnerability of youth (of which, at 23, I consider myself included) on this subject...

...Nicholas P Granath Minnetonka, Minnesota Franz Oppenheimer's otherwise excellent review of recent historiography about the German past is in error on a rather important point...

...McPhee is an environmental realist...

...He experienced something on the order of what millions of passengers used to experience as they came into the old Pennsylvania Station, hoisting their luggage of hopes into Manhattan ordragging their disappointments back home...

...More should go into one than eight disconnected essays, cardboard, and cloth...

...medical school, wanted to get back to helping people with their basic problems, ranging from hernias to marital spats...

...Dogmatism is utterly alien to his writing...

...The question then arises, what makes this anthology a book...

...In this way the relativism of collective guilt clears the youthful perspective for absolutist action and frees us from our inherent enemy, responsibility to experience...

...McPhee's chorus technique, which is also an impressionistic device, has an altogether different value...

...He is again writing short, varied, and readable articles...

...This technique gives some idea of what a family practitioner confronts in the course of an average day...

...The power companies were required to buy the electricity at favorable rates as a result of a law passed in 1978 to ease dependence on foreign oil...

...Hitler argued that winning the war was relatively unimportant compared to his priority of Jewish liquidation even before the 1941 date given by Haffner...

...That millions fewer will ever have such a moment is reason enough for those who sat, twenty-five years ago, on the boards of the Pennsylvania Railroad and the Madison Square Garden Corporation to call out, from Purgatory, an apology to the more elevated shades of Alexander Cassatt and Charles McKim...

...Kent Barwick, president of the Municipal Art Society of New York, puts it in a foreword...

...A.IkN,Yn Ply...

...If there were a theme to the book it would be this kind TABLE OF CONTENTS John McPhee/Farrar Straus Giroux/$15.95 Jacob Weisberg THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1986 53 of inventive entrepreneurship, and the independence of mind that gives rise to it...

...Oppenheimer correctly places the notion of collective guilt where it belongs—right next to dangerous deceit and political hypocrisy...

...Another piece where McPhee impresses the reader with his fair-mindedness is "Minihydro," which relates the rush of entrepreneurs in New York State to refurbish abandoned water mills with turbines and sell the electricity to power companies...

...His talent for making animals, trees, and exotic parts of the country appealing to those of us who don't ordinarily read about such things seemed to have all but disappeared in his recent books, Basin and Range (1981) and In Suspect Ter-rain (1983...

...He knows that developers pose a threat to the environment, but that if we respected every shrub as much as we could, we would build nothing and go nowhere...

...Eating is important, and it's one of the few recreations some older people have," he tells McPhee...

...Oppenheimer treats the declaration of war by Hitler as a part of his attack on Judaism, but in reality the war conGAMES ANTI-NUKES PLAY As nuclear power becomes increas- 111.11111MAwRµuliu00111mwRiaR ingly essential to the economies of the industrialized West, why has it been eight years since a power company ordered a nuclear power plant built in the United States...