THE STANDARD READER
The Standard Reader Books in Brief "The American Way": Family and Community in the Shaping of the American Identity by Allan Carlson (ISI, 211 pp., $15). Taking on those who posit individualism,...
...Taking on those who posit individualism, capitalism, or diversity as the dominant theme of American life, Allan Carlson makes the case that the United States is best understood through images of home and the child-rich family...
...Most readers know C.S...
...So he set out to create a religious department that would fulfill that need—and, along the way, found C.S...
...Lewis as the writer of children's fantasies and such perennially popular apologetics as The Screw-tape Letters...
...Given the way the BBC behaves now, one wishes people of the caliber of Welch and Lewis were working there still...
...But it was his brief career in radio during World War II, argues Justin Phillips, that helped form even his written work...
...Lewis...
...Guinness Extra Stout has been proven to have positive effects on the health of dogs (when consumed in moderation...
...I am not, by training, a historian, but I play one in the preceding pages," writes Fox News Channel's Eric Burns at the end of his thoroughly enjoyable "social history of alcohol...
...Lewis at the BBC: Messages of Hope in the Darkness of War by Justin Phillips (Marshall Pickering, 144 pp., $15.95...
...Mere Christianity, for instance, started as a series of broadcast talks and benefited from having been tailored to meet the requirements of radio...
...Robert W. Patterson The Spirits of America: A Social History of Alcohol by Eric Burns (Temple University Press, 326 pp., $29...
...Rattle-skull, Calibogus, Bombo, Mimbo, and Sillabub were all mixed drinks popular in the 1790s, but to Burns their names "sound like they could just as easily be served today at one of our franchised singles bars, a paper umbrella in the glass...
...Katherine Mangu-Ward C.S...
...Did you know, for instance, that "the real McCoy" was a particularly trustworthy bootlegger known for selling unadulterated hooch...
...This family ideal, held together economically by the "family wage" agenda of the labor unions and reinforced by the New Deal and the Social Security system, prevailed until the 1970s...
...Gina R. Dalfonzo...
...James Welch, the BBC's director of religious broadcasting, was a practical visionary who realized that during the war the English needed to know Christianity "had something to say to the life of the nation as a whole...
...Relying heavily on anecdote and biography, Burns examines America's complicated relationship with the demon rum—and he's at his best when he is dropping bits of trivia into longer tales...
...The Spirits of America focuses on prohibition, and Burns leaves no uncertainty what he thinks of the "noble experiment...
...Carlson also chronicles how the same federal power that shored up the family through the 1960s would haunt the family in subsequent decades...
...The Eighteenth Amendment, Burns writes with delicate hyperbole honed by over two decades in broadcast journalism, was "the worst idea ever proposed by a legislative body anywhere in the world...
...Reinforced by corporations, which generally sided with the equity feminists in enticing mothers into the workplace,these changes suggest any recovery of the American family ideal requires measures more substantial than the Republicans' rhetoric of "family values" and taxcuts...
...Phillips himself, who died just before the book's publication, had a long career at the BBC, and his inside knowledge helps him picture what Lewis's experiences were like...
...Tracing the long-standing rivalry between maternal feminists and equity feminists, Carlson notes Teddy Roosevelt's call for every healthy American wife to bear at least four children...
...That pro-family rhetoric not only helped to assimilate immigrants, but also gave the edge to the maternal feminists, who advocated a public policy that protected men in the workplace and women and children at home...
Vol. 9 • January 2004 • No. 19
