POLITICAL BOOK NOTES
political book notes Public affairs books to be published in September. American Forei Policy. Henry A. Kissinger. Norton, 66.g. American Government: The Facts Reorganized. Roderick A....
...Stephen D. Isaacs...
...of California, $12.50...
...Vincent and Vee Burke...
...This prompted Buckley to wonder exactly how large is “the configuration of handguns among those gathered in New York to guard the peace of the world...
...Morrow, $10...
...Columbia, $1072.95...
...Potomac Associates, $3.95...
...Who Rules the Universities: An Essay in Class Analysis...
...Thomas L. Blair...
...T. Y. Crowell, $5.95...
...Knopf, $17.95...
...A few of these are spare and perfunctory...
...Viking, $10...
...The Failure of United States Ener y Policy...
...Roderick A. Bell, David V. Edwards, eds...
...the insights obvious (“after an extensive exploration of the problem, I have come to believe that the solution, if there is one, lies in removing the causes of poverty and social distortion rather than simply doing away with welfare”), and the eye for detail alarmingly off (he refers to the terrorist actions of the ’60s as “thrashing...
...International Almanac of Electoral History...
...Arlington House, $8.95...
...Buckley still seems a bit obsessed by the ghost of Eleanor Roosevelt (“that charming, befuddled lady, about-whom James Burnham once wrote...
...Norton, $7.95...
...The Cold War Begins: Soviet-American Conflict Over Eastern Europe...
...The Breakdown of the Old Politics...
...such as the courts, prisons, and hospitals...
...Putnam’s, $6.95...
...The Incredible Pierpont Morgan...
...A delightful account of Buckley’s Walter Mitty-ish stint as a member of our United Nations delegation last fall...
...Barbara Chasin, Gerald Chasin...
...Alan P. Westin, Barry Mahoney...
...United Nations Journal: A Delegate’s Odyssey...
...Rachel Scott...
...Public Higher Education in California...
...The International Urban Crisis...
...Employment and Earnings Inadequacy: A New Social Indicator...
...Basic...
...Pocket Books, $.95...
...Frank Levy, Arnold J. Metsner, Aaron Wildavsky...
...General Learning, $6...
...Innocents at Home: America in the 1970s...
...Neil J. Smelser, Gabriel Almond, eds...
...Szulc, the renowned foreign correspondent for The New York Times, set out five years ago “to write a book as if I were a foreign correspondent from a faraway country engaged in the process of discovering this land...
...Richard C. Mancke...
...Although Buckley’s account makes no pretense of being aqything more than anecdotal, the book is full of little-publicized details, such as the time the Cuban ambassador’s bodyguards pulled their revolvers on the floor of the General Assembly...
...Murphy’s goal is “to capture the spirit of the New Politics as an influence on Congress,” but the book neither clearly defines the phenomenon (Chet Holifield, the leading congressional defender of the Atomic Energy Commission, is described as “a New Politics leader”), nor provides much more than the academic equivalent of cut-and-paste journalism...
...The Entre reneurs: Ex lorations within the American iusiness Tragtion...
...Wilson Clark...
...More frequently, the evidence is familiar (“breakfast cereals, once the byword of American children, were revealed to be full of nothing but artificial additives...
...Welfare Medicine in America: A Case Study of Medicaid...
...Henry J. Pratt...
...George Edwards Norton...
...political book notes Public affairs books to be published in September...
...Jim Bishop...
...Robert Sobell...
...FDR’s Last Year...
...Princeton, $15...
...This is an important contribution to the literature of government...
...Louis Board of Education...
...Indiana Univ., $15/4.95...
...Bishop’s usual weaknesses-a tendency toward shallowness in his thought and journalese in his prose-are much less evident in this thoroughly fascinating account of the year that ended April 12, 1945...
...ederick C. Mosher, et al...
...more are gooey...
...The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York...
...Although he refers again and again to the thousands of miles he has traveled and the states he has seen, the yield from the journey is a collection of the commonplace and the cliched...
...Columbia Univ., $8.95...
...Doubleday, $12.50...
...Rousas J. Rushdoony...
...Doubleday, $8.95...
...Monthly Review, $7.95...
...Donald R. Lesh, ed...
...Sar A. Levitan, Robert Taggart 111...
...Dutton, $8.95...
...some approach sexual ardor...
...It is also a marvelous read...
...Lexington...
...Princeton, $14.50...
...What detracts from the effectiveness of this approach is the refusal to let the stories tell themselves, the tone of strident, generalized outrage (“The Constitution cannot protect us from the greatest threat of all: being considered less than a person”), and the methodical use of every account as an argument for the predictable radical solution...
...David Caplovitz...
...Schenkman, $4.40...
...Univ...
...The Politics of Pornography...
...The New Politics Congress...
...Cass Canfield...
...The Trial of Martin Luther King...
...Ethno-Religious Politics...
...A Nation Observed: Perspectives on America’s World Role...
...Power and Ideology...
...however, these, asides are a small price to pay for his bemused view of the proceedings...
...Muscle and Blood...
...Tad Szulc...
...Thomas P. Murphy...
...Mini-Sketches of Great Americans...
...David N. Smith...
...Justice in Everyday Life: The Way It Really Works...
...Surprisingly, for a reporter of Szulc’s skill, only in two brief sections does the book have the authoritative tone of first-hand observation (one is a discussion of suburban social trends, the other, politics in Berkeley...
...than at a royal wedding...
...The sad thing is that, even in the absence of corruption, the city government is incapable of treating its citizens fairly, of doing anything more than changing its budget a bit, responding to the pieces of paper (the only thing the road engineers understand are state funding requirements and reports of heavy traffic), continuing a system that was created in a piecemeal fashion and lacks any coherent set of values...
...Written in the form of case histories, the best accounts document instances of terrible treatment of the poor at the hands of societv’s institutions...
...Jews and Political Power...
...Watergate: Im lications for Responsible Government...
...John A. Gardiner, {avid J. Olson, eds...
...Weybright & Talley, $12.50...
...Buckley has mellowed enough to concede that the UN has its uses (although he isn’t very specific about what they are), but he can’t resist noting that “it is not possible, inside the UN, to refer to its shortcomings without going on to say ‘however.’ ” Buckley is at his best when he details his frustrations with the suffocating realities of UN rhetoric: “It is easy to say that there are more congratulations profferred during sessions of the General Assembly...
...At its best, this book serves as a needed reminder that the poor are still with us and just as badly off, but the editor seems more interested in keeping the ’60s fires glowing than anything else...
...Energy for Survival: The Alternative to Extinction...
...The authors, by studying three departments of the City of Oakland, have given us a picture of an unconscious mechanism which builds cities and supplies services without any sense of why it is doing these things, or any awareness of the effects on the citizens...
...Lynn Etheridge Davis...
...Free Press, $10.95...
...Howard Zinn, ed...
...William 1. Bacchus...
...For a sequel, Buckley might consider joining the ADA...
...Hill & Wang, $6.95...
...Free Press, $15...
...Everything is here, from Moses’ genuine triumphs like the Saw Mill River Parkway, to his many miserable nasties like destroying the Aquarium and the 92nd Street ferry, to his major crime of paving over New York, to his pioneering creation of government institutions that are totally unaccountable...
...she treated the world as her personal slum project...
...of California, $12.50...
...Government in Oakland (and there is no reason to think it isn’t typical of many large cities) is not particularly corrupt...
...General Learning, $3.50...
...Arlington House, $6.95...
...Although Sobell does not pull the portraits together, one fascinating theme emerges: every one of these successful entrepeneurs had as his dream rubbing out the other entrepreneurs and making himself a monopoly...
...Johns Hopkins, $6.00/2.50...
...Urban Outcomes: Schools, Streets and Libraries...
...Morrow, $12.50...
...Howard Zinn has been an enthusiastic advocate of history “from the bottom up...
...Robert and Rosemary Steveqs Free Press, $13.95...
...Nixon’s Good Deed: Welfare Reform...
...Consumers in Trouble: A Study of Debtors in Default...
...Thomas A. Laine...
...Short, competent, generally interesting biographies of nine men who built business empires, including John Wanamaker of department store fame, James Buchanan Duke of tobacco and universities, and David Douglas, whose airline company lost the post-war race with Boeing...
...Submerged in the definitions-ofterms and the bloodless prose is an important description and analysis of city bureaucracies...
...Theft of the City: Readings on Corm tion in Urban America...
...Thomas T. Mackie, Richard Rose...
...Pioneer-at-Law: A Legacy in the Pursuit of Justice...
...Harper & Row, $17.50...
...Univ...
...Policy and the Bureaucratic Process: The tate Department’s Country Director System...
...This book attempts to use the technique in looking at contemporary American society...
...William F. Buckley...
...Robert A. Caro...
Vol. 6 • September 1974 • No. 7
