REVIEWS
Tyrell, R. Emmett Jr.
j ^ D l W ' by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. T H E A M E R I C A W E LOST BY Mario Pei The New American Library, $4.95 The America W e Lost, according to its dust jacket, "is written out of...
...Not the furtive existential freedom chanted by the thalidomide intellectuals of the new left...
...David Cavefiix...
...And well it might, for Professor Mario Pei is one of those porcine fascists at Columbia who has been brutalizing "the children" and is now "up against the wall" — so to speak, after a fashion...
...H o w it ends God knows...
...With scintillating prose, and irresistable logic the author argues iconoclastically that if America would rely more on its eighteenth-century constitutional foundations it would more closely approximate its twentieth-century aspirations...
...Pei writes with a warm nostalgia for the past but with a relentless zest for the future...
...if H e is an insomniac...
...A future he hypothesizes which would be freed of uneconomic taxation, exorcized of communism's specter, and rescued from I)erverted domestic policies that breed crime, anomie, apathy and despair more characteristic of nineteenthcentury milltowns than what some dreamily envision as m o d e m America...
...In spite of its progressive rhetoric Pei feels liberaldom's model America actually "evokes the nineteenth-century model coimtry...
...Nightstand Reader, $.50 "A student of campus events is struck at once by the fact . . ." Thus begins this epic portrayal of life, love, and pursuit of mighty empires, riches, fame, martyrdom and sainthood...
...T H E A M E R I C A W E LOST BY Mario Pei The New American Library, $4.95 The America W e Lost, according to its dust jacket, "is written out of profound personal concern...
...not the freedom that leaves the individual as a respiring orgaiusm amongst the lairs of H o m o urbanistis, inclined to little more civility than occasionally cleaning beneath its nails and grooming its hair and that of its mate...
...T H E HISTORY O F S T U D E N T G O V E R N M E N T A T INDIANA BT Dr...
...Feeling government exists for the individual and that only someone grievously foreign to America's democratic tradition would ask ". . . what you can do for your country," Pei shows that the Sixteenth Amendment firmly fixed the federal government not on the states but on the individual...
...Yet maintaining his cool, he has written a sprightly chrestomathy of "the conT h e Author cems of a conservative" — and more, the concerns of one who in 1905 emigrated from the stagnation of bureaucratically immured Europe to the teeming shores of young America — a nation which had "endowed liberty with a new meaning" that being freedom from government, freedom for the individual...
...Pei writes of what he regards as the evanescence of personal freedom into a creeping smog of government pollution, which threatens the vitality of a once vigorous people...
...And with individuals shuffling about under the increasing weight of big brother Pei feels they are losing that sprightly step which enabled them to build the mightiest and yet most generous nation in the world...
...In one of the worthiest books of the year Pei reverses the sjoitax on those who in 1964 welcomed Barry Goldwater to fox trot into the twentieth century, and in so doing gains the last laugh...
...but the freedom to seek knowledge and beauty, build an industrial empire or write a symphony, and ultimately the freedom to resolve oneself — that is what America has meant to this world-renowned philologist, the author of over thirty books for whose expertise even Granville Hicks throws garlands...
...j ^ D l W ' by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
Vol. 2 • May 1969 • No. 5
