F. E. Cartus
On November 20, 1964--the last day of the third session of the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council in Rome--the highest legislative and representative body of the Roman Catholic Church, by the overwhelming vote of 1893 to 99, approved of a document condemning "hatred and persecution of Jews..." This text, running a little more than six paragraphs, marked a turning point in the history of the Church.
David Halberstam
Some were later to claim that the difficulties which arose between the press and the American mission were the result of poor handling or inept news management. But in fact the conflict went much deeper.
Bertrand Russell and Aron Vergelis
The following exchange between Bertrand Russell and Aron Vergelis, the editor of the Yiddish language Soviet magazine, "Sovietish heimland," was initiated last spring by a letter to Lord Russell from a Russian Jew who wished him to intercede against the suppression of Jewish culture.
Maurice Friedberg
According a theory currently fashionable among Western Sovietologists, the abyss that separates the Soviet Union from the United States is gradually narrowing. Whatever the merits of this theory, it does not seem to hold for the Jews in the two countries.
Kenneth M. Stampp
In much serious history, and in a durable popular legend, two American epochs--the Civil War and the reconstruction that followed--bear an odd relationship to one another.
Nathan Asch
Though it has not been written about much, the children of famous artists do not have an easy time, nor do they usually end up well. Do I sound resentful, jealous? I must have been so from the beginning, being the son of Sholem Asch.
George Lichtheim
What follows are casual reflections--all of them personal--passing through the mind of a visitor who normally makes his home in England.
Milton Himmelfarb
The ancients knew it and we learn it anew every day: no opinion is so absurd as not to be professed by some learned man. A favorite and long-lived absurd opinion of many who are learned and many who are intellectual, especially if they are Jews, is about Jews.
Reviewed by Isaac Bashevis Singer
Some consider Martin Buber a poet, some a philosopher, others a mystic. Almost all agree that he is an unclear thinker.
Reviewed by Neil Compton
The typical reader of "Commentary" is living in a numbed and somnambulistic trance, self-hypnotized by his visual, linear bias. The ads are the best part of the journal. These conclusions are forced upon anyone who accepts the main argument of "Understanding Media."
Reviewed by George Kateb
For some time there has been a strong revival of interest in the political theory of democracy. David Spitz's book is part of that revival. Spitz's ultimate commitment is to the dignity and welfare of the individual.
Reviewed by George P. Elliott
A cue to what Hubert Selby may be after is given on the dust jacket. the anonymous flap calls the Brooklyn slum in which the characters live "the lowest rung of hell." Selby as a hell-guide: that makes some sense.
Reviewed by Staughton Lynd
Professor Jones surprises us at the outset. This book, in its mingled success and failure, suggests some important conclusions about cultural history.
Bayard Rustin
The civil rights movement is evolving from a protest movement into a full-fledged social movement--an evolution calling its very name into question. It is now concerned not merely with removing the barriers to full opportunity but with achieving the fact of equality.
George Steiner
To have been a European Jew in the first half of the 20th century was to pass sentence on one's own children, to force upon them a condition almost beyond rational understanding. And which may recur.
Nathan Glazer
As I write this, in late December, we in Berkeley are in the Christmas lull. But faculty studies, teaching-assistant rooms, and libraries are busy and show no signs that this is a holiday. And I am afraid it will not be easy for our friends in other places to understand what is going on here.
Dan Jacobson
What is immediately striking about the stories and novels of Isaac Bashevis Singer is the contrast between the formidable barriers to understanding which appear to surround his work and the simplicity and directness of his narrative style.
Donald S. Zagoria
What is now happening in Vietnam may well be only the beginning of a new phase in the cold war, with the theater of operations shifting from Europe to Asia, and with the United States trying to contain Communism there just as it sought to do in Europe in the 1950's.
Joseph Kraft
To critics, J. Edgar Hoover is the advance guard of the police state. To boosters, he is the modern knight errant. For better or worse, he is made to cast a shadow larger than life.
Hilton Kramer
Artists who live in small, developing countries at some distance from the principal centers of artistic innovation, confront an insidious dilemma. Now, apparently, it is to be Israel's turn at this vast gaming table. The test will come next season when one sees how many Israeli artists are taken up by important dealers.
Keith Botsford
We were born within two months of each other, the Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes and I, but that cannot possibly explain why we understand each other with such facility.
George Dennison
LeRoi Jones, in his two new plays, "The Toilet" and "The Slave," but especially in the latter, has raised a lot of questions and has answered them all in terms of race.
Reviewed by David Daiches
I was particularly gratified to find in the introductory chapter of Harold Fisch's admirable study of the Hebraic factor in 17th-century English literature a cogently argued demonstration of the nature of the confusion between Hebraism and Puritanism.
Reviewed by David T. Bazelon
"The Real Voice" is a fascinating anecdotal narrative about eh whole process of administered pricing hearings in Senate Subcommittee on Antitrust by a very effective "New Yorker" writer with a good command of novelistic techniques.
Reviewed by John Gross
There was once a man who planned to write a history of England from 1066 to the present, to be entitled "The Age of Transition." At first sight Robert Brustein's book seems much the same kind of enterprise.
Reviewed by Walter Goodman
Newton N. Minow came to the post of Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission in 1961 with estimable qualities. This collection of Mr. Minow's speeches shows that he tried to do something as FCC Chairman.
Reviewed by Kathleen Nott
Sartre occasionally describes himself as a Marxist. It is difficult to see why, unless we suppose that in his own Existentialist "Church" he is making a distinction between a spiritual and a secular arm.
Reviewed by Mary Ellmann
Almost all the pictures reproduced here with such painstaking care were done in 1943. Almost all the children who drew them were dead in 1944.
David Danzig
Just as it was incorrect to regard the Goldwater candidacy as merely a conspiratorial coup, so it is misleading to take the bare statistics of Goldwater support as a true index of rightist strength in the United States.
Richard H. Rovere
Shortly after the last election, William F. Buckley, Jr., in his syndicated newspaper column, urged his fellow "conservatives" to "consider the fate of the Socialist party in American elections...Notwithstanding [the party] was deeply influential in American politics." There are some valid and intriguing analogies between Right and Left in American politics, but Buckley's isn't one of them.
Elie Wiesel
Somewhere in Transylvania, in the shadow of the Carpathians, very near the most capricious frontier of Eastern Europe, there is a dusty little town called Sighet. This was my town once; it is not my town now. Nowadays, in spite of the Iron Curtain, distances no longer matter.
Stephen Toulmin
From time to time in the history of ideas a man appears who, for a while, comes near to defeating all criticism: not because his works are above criticism, nor because their value is universally agreed upon, but rather through sheer elusiveness. Such a man, surely, was the late Father Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.
George Lichtheim
When it comes to China, conservatives, liberals, and socialists begin to look and sound remarkably alike. Even the communist camp is not immune, as witness the current Soviet attempt to prize North Vietnam loose from Peking's iron grip, while Washington worries about the fate of its satellite in the south.
Mary Ellmann
Since their political equality was secured by the suffragettes, American women have toyed with the idea, the possibility in nature, of entering college teaching, and all other fields of educated work. But as Mrs. Jessie Bernard points out in "Academic Women," their first happy flush of professionalism in the 20's dwindled in the 30's and almost disappeared in the 40's.
Gloria Goldreich
They are not a drinking group, the Israelis. When letters from home have been few or not at all, they may brood their way through one or two bottles of beer but usually coffee is their drink. But on May 7th they do not drink coffee.
A. Alvarez
Your first and last impression of Poland, as of all Eastern Europe, is of a shifting but utterly pervasive sense of trouble. It is as though history had been too much for the place.
Philip Selznick and Nathan Glazer
Professor Nathan Glazer's account of the student protest at Berkeley, published last month, is distressing to many who have been close to the events.
Reviewed by Ronald Steel
Unloved by those it serves as much as by those it subverts, the CIA has entered the popular mythology as a composite demon: half-terrifying, half-ludicrous. It is cursed for existing at all.
Reviewed by Cynthia Ozick
Lore Segal's book has a peculiar tone. It is dry, cold, literal, even numb. its comedy is without sympathy or hope.
Reviewed by Peter Marris
A few months ago, I was standing with Charles Abrams by a muddy field five miles outside Nairobi, inspecting a building site for squatters. As growing populations and a taste of sophistication bring millions from the rural areas to the city every year, the struggle for shelter grows harsher.
Reviewed by J. G. Weightman
It is well known that the French are among the most intellectual nations of the world--perhaps, even, the most intellectual--and that France is the Western country where Communism has been strongest and most vocal during the last half-century.
Herbert J. Gans
For some time now, a few city planners and housing experts have been pointing out that urban renewal was not achieving its general aims, and social scientists have produced a number of critical studies of individual renewal projects.
Robert Penn Warren
The present piece will form a section of Robert Penn Warren's new book, "Who Speaks for the Negro?"
Emil L. Fackenheim
In the eyes of Judaism, whatever meaning life acquires derives from this encounter: the Divine accepts and confirms the human in the moment of meeting.
Dezso Kosztolanyi
A story.
Milton Himmelfarb
Four men made the revolution that has transformed the world in the past century: Darwin, Marx, Freud, and Einstein. Two of them, Freud and Einstein, were Jews. How could the Jews, a tiny minority, account for half of the most significant names in the intellectual history of modernity?
William Phillips
A specter is haunting modern literature, the specter of avant-garde homosexuality. Some people are thrilled, others frightened, by the morbid prospects.
Jakov Lind
Frankfurt has better things to offer than those 22 men. The evening, so friendly and cool at first, is already spoilt, for tomorrow I am to look at 22 SS-men in civilian clothing who helped to kill a few million people. Should one feel sorrow and pity? Or revenge?
Harold Rosenberg
In addition to being practiced by professionals, psychoanalysis is used to some degree by most of us to explain things to ourselves.
Ronald Sanders
In 1904, after having been employed as a clerk for more than twenty years, Aaron David Gordon left his native Russia for Palestine, to begin a new life there as an agricultural laborer.
Reviewed by Roger Owen
Doris Lessing, who grew up in Southern Rhodesia between the two wars, has been a witness of the late glories of Empire and has observed at first hand the drama of racial antagonism which increasingly fills our minds.
Reviewed by Warren Coffey
Alexander Donat's memoir of those lunatic and terrible years in Poland and Germany during the Holocaust is divided into four sections. Its merits are considerable indeed.
Reviewed by Ben B. Seligman
To his great credit, Michael Reagan makes the matter of free enterprise as safe enterprise thoroughly explicit in "The Managed Economy," one of the more sober studies of managerial ideology to have been published in recent years.
Reviewed by Daniel J. Callahan
Thomas Merton has always occupied a special place in the American Catholic Church, though for different reasons at different times.
Reviewed by Lewis A. Coser
Richard Lowenthal, currently a visiting research fellow at Columbia University, was for many years a journalist who wrote from London on international affairs. Lowenthal shows convincingly that the disintegration of the Communist camp was foreshadowed as early as Tito's split with Stalin in 1948 and was in full progress after Stalin's death in 1953.
Walter Z. Laqueur
In recent months German-Jewish, and German-Israeli, relations have become almost inextricably entangled in wider issues: they can no longer be explained without constant reference to German domestic and foreign policy, to the Middle Eastern conflict, and indeed to East-West relations in general.
David T. Bazelon
Let me suggest the following hypothesis: the political events of 1964 make possible, and all but insure, the belated completion of the New Deal.
Robert Alter
The "Menorah Journal" was surely one of the most exciting episodes in the history of the America-Jewish intellectual community, and its volumes, which extend over nearly half a century, provide a fascinating record of the varying efforts of this community to preserve a meaningful attachment to Jewish culture.
George Lichtheim
The Western alliance is threatened by something else besides the re-awakening of nationalism in Europe. That something else is the trouble Europeans are having in trying to make sense of American policies in Asia.
C. Vann Woodward
The making of Southern mythology has not been an exclusively regional enterprise. No doubt Southerners themselves have been the most prolific contributors, but they have had too much assistance from outside to claim exclusive authorship.
Marshall Sklare
The question of Jewish assimilation has always been vexed by two different considerations: how willing was the general community to accept Jews fully, and how willing were Jews to deliver themselves up to the norms of the general community. Usually, though, one of the considerations has been tabled in order to focus attention on the other.
Mordecai Richler
Nothing in the new wave of Anglo-Jewish pop culture, however, compares in interest to the real life story of John Bloom. Bloom is a hero.
Reviewed by Neil Compton
Was America the new Eden, inhabited by a guiltless race of "gentle, loving, and faithful" Indians, or a "hideous wilderness full of wild men," which demanded to be tamed? Leo Marx shows that the answers to this question often depended less upon evidence than they did upon the preconceptions of the witness.
Reviewed by Chaim Potok
Rabbi Louis Jacobs is troubled by the "obstacles to belief in some of the classic expressions of the Jewish Creed in those areas where facts about the universe, presented by new knowledge, contradict some of the older formulations." In this book Rabbi Jacobs attempts to spell out what a modern Jew can believe in terms of the thirteen principles of faith formulated by Maimonides in the 12th century.
Reviewed by Jason Epstein
The qualities which so greatly distinguish V. S. Pritchett as a literary critic--his reasonableness, his fine sense of the concrete and the relevant, the restraint with which he calls upon his passions--seem, in the case of his new book on New York to embarrass him.
Reviewed by Thomas F. Curley
The Curley crowd and the Fitzgerald-Kennedy clan never did get along. Political rivalry accounts only partly for this.
Reviewed by Albert Goldman
Back in the mid-50's, B. H. Haggin, who at that time had been the music critic of "The Nation" for almost twenty years and had built up a formidable reputation as a fearless champion of the highest musical values. Since then, however, he has not returned to writing the kind of essays that made him America's last distinguished music journalist.
Reviewed by Robert Penn Warren
Even if Ralph Ellison were not the author of "Invisible Man," his recent collection of essays, "Shadow and Act," would be a very significant work.
Robert Lekachman
Lyndon B. Johnson is without question more lovingly immersed in domestic issues, and more effective in getting his programs through Congress, than any American President since Franklin Roosevelt in his first term of office.
Bayard Rustin and Tom Kahn
When Lyndon Johnson goes before a joint session of Congress and proclaims that "We Shall Overcome," how is the civil-rights movement to react? And when, in the same speech, he pays homage to demonstrations as a wellspring of legislative progress, what is the civil-rights movement to say?
Maurice Goldbloom
In the autumn of 1963 the international prestige of the United States stood higher than at any previous time since the end of World War II. In the spring of 1965, the international prestige of the United States is lower than at any time within recent memory.
Selma Fraiberg
This decade of public commotion over reading methods and the teaching of literature has not yet produced major reforms.
Marcus Cunliffe
Like a half-buried former civilization--famous, extensive, and perplexing--the Adams family is being uncovered for us. Henry of the fourth generation has especially engrossed us, because he is the most interesting and tantalizing of the lot.
David Schoenbaum
It took only two weeks for the Bundestag to cover the route from mystique to politique. On March 10, before jammed press galleries and a national radio audience, the house debated measures for the extension of the statute of limitations of Nazi murders in a first reading. On March 25, it reached a tortuous compromise.
Deirdre Levinson
A story.
Dennis H. Wrong
In "The Protestant Establishment," E. Digby Baltzell shares the liberal indignation over racial and ethnic discrimination. Baltzell does not, however, share the concomitant liberal opposition to an elite recruited primarily by birth.
Keith Botsford
What has been achieved in Puerto Rico is no small thing. I won't repeat the statistics, but people are plainly better off than they were some twenty years ago when Luis Munoz Marin first emerged as a leader.
Reviewed by Richard Poirier
William James probably would have admired Norman Mailer's "An American Dream." And since to read James is more instructive about contemporary literature than to read the reviews of Mailer's book, there's a chance that the novel will find the respected place in history that literary journalism refuses to give it.
Reviewed by John Mander
The strengths of Mr. Naipaul's book lie, then, where one would expect them to lie--in his novelist's ear for talk, in his shrewd, observant eye for detail.
Reviewed by George P. Elliott
In this book Irving Malin is concerned with seven important contemporary poets and fiction writers who are both Jews and Americans and who deal explicitly with Jewishness.
Reviewed by Werner J. Dannhauser
This book was completed in Japan in 1939 and first published in Switzerland in 1941. At that time its author was in exile from Germany.
Reviewed by Henry David Aiken
Not least among Mr. Rosenberg's manifest powers as a chronicler, front-runner, and occasional monitor to "the art establishment," as he calls it, is his talent as a slogan maker.
Oscar Gass
A century ago, one unification of Germany was accomplished. Our Europe of the second half of the 1960's, in which the problem of German unification is again posed, fancies itself all dynamism and commitment.
Herbert Weiner
It was eighteen years ago in Jerusalem that I had my first experience of Hasidism--flesh-and-blood Hasidism, that is, as opposed to its literary counterpart.
Milton Himmelfarb
For Mr. Ben Gurion, the seventeen centuries between Bar Kochba's rebellion (132-35 c.E.) and Zionism are not Jewish history but a cessation of history. In those centuries the Jews are seen as having been objects, not subjects. This must have been the last thing James Q. Wilson and Edward C. Banfield had in mind when they wrote their "Public-regardingness as a Value Premise in Voting Behavior."
George Lichtheim
De Gaulle is not merely resented as an obstacle to U.S. policy: he causes genuine rage and bewilderment. This irritation is fed by memories of a not very distant past, when American leadership was not seriously challenged. They are also fed by the Palmerstonian mood into which official Washington have fallen since the advent of the Johnson administration.
Louis Berg
J.B. Borthwick in his "Three Years in California" was right in the main. Jews in Eldorado, with few exceptions, did not work in the mines, but rather served the men who did.
Harold R. Isaacs
The treads of anti-colonialism have worn smooth with the hard running of the last decade or so. Only a few colonial dots remain now on the world's map and the only anti-colonial war still going on is taking place obscurely in remote Portugese Angola.
George M. Raymond, Malcolm D. Rivkin and Herbert J. Gans
The following exchange was occasioned by Herbert J. Gans's article, "The Failure of Urban Renewal," which appeared in the April "Commentary."
Reviewed by George Dennison
For several months now a public-spirited poster has been displayed in the New York City subway trains, simply a line of type: "I quit school when I were in the sixth grade." Many rebuttals have been scrawled on the poster, expressing by and large a much finer sense of the dilemma. "You was a smart boy, I staid on thru colidge." This brief dialogue states the leading positions.
Reviewed by Marvin Fox
Israel Efros's significant contribution consists of an original and illuminating account of biblical and rabbinic metaphysics, which he then uses as the basis for a philosophy of biblical ethics.
Reviewed by J. F. Powers
Franz Jagerstatter was an Austrian peasant. He was born in the village of St. Radegund, not far from Braunau, where Hitler was born. He grew up to be something of a wild one. Then he changed.
Reviewed by Hilton Kramer
Had Max Eastman died or lapsed into silence around 1930, his stature would undoubtedly loom larger than it does today.
Reviewed by Harold Steinberg
"The Great Train Robbery" is much too hastily put together to do justice to one of the greatest capers of all time, if it is to be judged by haul alone--more than seven million dollars, taken from a British mail train on August 8, 1963.
Stanley Kauffmann
Profound changes are inevitable in the arts. I contend, without paradox, that only those who are opposed to change, or are suspicious of it, are qualified to superintend those changes; and must certainly be concerned to influence them.
Thomas R. Brooks
The whole notion of a civilian review of police behavior is distasteful to the police themselves. But dissatisfaction with the conduct of New York's Finest has been simmering for several years now and--mainly because of a series of recent scandals--they will undoubtedly have to swallow some form of public review before too long.
Ronald Sanders
To many Americans, Jewish or Gentile, it may seem remarkable that the figure is as high as it is: that as many as sixteen thousand of their compatriots have chosen to make their homes in a remote country whose standard of living is so far below that of the United States. To many Israelis and Zionist leaders, it is shocking that such a small proportion from the largest Jewish community in the world have chosen to recognize the Jewish state as their homeland.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
A story.
Michael Novak
Hardly a conflict at the Second Vatican Council has not been colored by this fundamental issue: whether the Church shall be Latin or Catholic. There is no need to recapitulate here the story of the Council thus far. As to its repercussions in America, however, from 1962 on, pioneering ecumenical gatherings in city after city, attracting thousands, have been electric in their impact.
Mary Ellmann
Simone de Beauvoir is distinguished by her consistency; on everything she writes, her identity is stamped indelibly.
Jervis Anderson
I've always had a feeling for uprooted people; people making it, somehow, amid circumstances and rhythms of life different and distant from those in which they were raised.
Leon Poliakov
To become, after his death, the most unlikely hero of a controversial play and to owe his official rehabilitation in his own country mostly to a passionate debate over the memory of Pius XII: such has been the posthumous fate of Kurt Gerstein, the "Spy of God"--a fate as outrageously improbable as his life, as Rolf Hochhuth's play, and indeed as the whole madhouse that was Hitler's Germany.
Reviewed by George Kateb
Eyebrows were raised last summer when the "New York Times" reported that Harry Jaffa was writing campaign speeches for Barry Goldwater. How could it be that this student of Professor Leo Strauss, this respected teacher of political theory would lend his intelligence to such a cause.
Reviewed by Seymour Siegel
Professor Davies sets out to examine the influences both within and outside the Church "which led to the concentrated presentation of moral teaching known as the Sermon on the Mount."
Reviewed by Neil Compton
"O Canada" is the kind of work we have come to expect from Edmund Wilson these days--rambling and discursive, based upon wide but unsystematic reading.
Reviewed by Howard S. Becker
I suppose it is an exaggeration to say that no sensible person opposes changing the way we presently deal with our narcotics problem for something akin to the British system, but it is not much of an exaggeration.
Reviewed by Allen Guttmann
Historical convention has it now that World War II began when Hitler's Wehrmacht moved across the Polish border. A more accurate date would be July 17, 1936, when the garrisons of Ceuta, Melilla, and Tetuan rose in rebellion against the Spanish government, or July 19th, when a majority of the people proved by armed resistance their loyalty to the Republic.
George Lichtheim
To the foreigner who spends some time in the United States, few features of the local scenery are more surprising than the general esteem in which the "New York Times" is held.
David Daiches
The great medieval Jewish biblical commentator Rabbi Solomon ben Isaac remarked at the beginning of his commentary on Genesis that the Torah should really have commenced not with the story of Creation but with the second verse of the twelfth chapter of Exodus, where the first actual precept is found.
Peter Schmid
For a Western visitor it is indeed difficult to take the Communist character of the Castro regime seriously.
Robert Alter
The peculiar cultural phenomenon which some choose to call an American Jewish literary renaissance is by now showing signs of having overstayed its critical welcome.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
A story.
Haywood Burns
In line with the thesis that Negro voting strength is the primary means of correcting inequities existing in the South, the Justice Department under the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960 filed more than forty suits in cases of voting intimidation and discrimination.
Ernst Pawel
The Soviet Union's anti-sexual revolution is now in its fourth decade, its elan seemingly undiminished by Stalin's death and Khrushchev's thaw. But objective research as to the deeper effects of this pervasive puritanism on Soviet marriage has always been hampered by the lack of relevant data.
Reviewed by Roger Owen
Dr. Conor Cruise O'Brien is a disarmingly witty and perceptive writer, full of unpredictable quirks and movements.
Reviewed by J. G. Weightman
The repeated use of the term "provocative" on the dust-jacket of Mr. Fowlie's new book is puzzling, because there is nothing at all startling in his study of Andre Gide.
Reviewed by Andrew Hacker
Was it really a "caper," Mr. Rovere? Even from the distance of a full year it hardly seems that way: September and October of 1964 were pretty grim months. We crossed our fingers, uttered small prayers, and saw just a few too many Goldwater-Miller bumper stickers passing us on the roads.
Reviewed by Paul Winter
By religious conviction, Rabbi Sandmel is a member of the Reform Synagogue; in terms of New Testament scholarship he must be classed as a conservative.
Reviewed by Paul Johnson
I cannot remember any time since its formation in 1949 when the Atlantic Alliance was not said to be passing through a crisis. These two sober and well-argued books take the present "crises" very seriously indeed, and display much anxious cogitation about their solution.
Oscar Gass
Whoever directs thought toward political forces in the shaping of the economy of the United States, during the century since the abolition of slavery, cannot fail to light upon two critical years--1896 and 1932. I think that 1964 may be another such year.
Osip Mandelstam
Though his work is relatively unknown in the West, Osip Mandelstam (1891-1938) is regarded as one of the leading modern Russian poets. The following selections, part of a memoir of his youth, have been taken from "The Prose of Osip Mandelstam."
Susan Sontag
We live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed, destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror. It is fantasy which allows most people to cope with these twin specters. The fantasy to be discovered in science fiction films beautifies the world and neutralizes it.
Henry Fairlie
During the time that I have been in the United States, I have found nothing more strange or more unattractive than the way in which American intellectuals take pleasure in reviling President Johnson.
Milton Himmelfarb
Ever since Wilson's essay "On First Reading Genesis," I have wondered how it would be to examine the Greek New Testament as he examined the Hebrew Bible, but I got around to it only with the current debate over the Judeo-Christian tradition. This is a report on the first book, Matthew.
Neil Compton
If it does not intoxicate, sudden immersion in 100-proof American television is likely to leave the viewer with two strong impressions: first, the great networks seem to express a massive political consensus; second, they are commercial to a degree which even an outsider used to television advertising finds overwhelming.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
A memoir.
Seymour Martin Lipset
The largest and most successful radical rightist organizations in American history--those which use extremist tactics in an effort to restore the privileges of declining social strata--have been the groups which have operated under the name, Ku Klux Klan.
Reviewed by William Phillips
Because he sees radicalism as the occupational disease of the intellectuals, Christopher Lasch transforms it into a cultural phenomenon, cut off from politics and economics.
Reviewed by Baruch Hochman
The irony of the modern Hebrew revival, like the irony of Zionism itself, is that even as it joined, it also sundered.
Reviewed by Peter Gay
In our mad world, a serious study of madness invites facile irony. Who is sane? Who is mad? Michel Foucault has found it impossible to resist this pair of questions.
Reviewed by D. J. Enright
To some extent it is a sad reflection on the predictability of current novelists that we should find many of Raymond Williams's pages startlingly original.
Reviewed by Joseph Epstein
In this long and valuable inquiry, Warren seeks to determine precisely what the helots have in mind.
Marjorie Grene
In "New Paths in Biology," Adolf Portmann makes a distinction which can serve as a useful introduction to his thought. He points out that the dramatic advance of biological research in the past few decades has been proceeding on two very different fronts.
Adolf Portmann
Anyone who speaks of man's special position in the realm of the living, must also stress that this problem has behind it a strange history, one that still affects the discussions of our time even though we are not always fully conscious of it.
Chaim A. Kaplan
The excerpts below are from the diaries of Chaim Aron Kaplan, a writer, Hebrew scholar, and educator, who perished with his wife at Treblinka in December 1942 or January 1943.
Donald S. Zagoria
Since 1958, when the Chinese began to perceive a new revolutionary upsurge in Asia, Africa, and Latin America and became increasingly willing to challenge Soviet leadership of the Communist world, they have been systematically proposing a revolutionary strategy based on their own experience.
Leslie H. Farber
At this date, there cannot be many within the psychoanalytic movement who would dispute the fact that psychoanalysis is, among other things, a moral science whose involvement with problems of good and evil is both inescapable and essential, regardless of its scientific vocabulary for naming these problems.
Midge Decter
For many of us, movies have always provided what novels apparently did to young ladies in the 18th century: the opportunity for a momentary feeling, acknowledged to be illusory, that life is something both larger and at a greater distance from us than it normally appears.
Ronald Sanders
The world of real experience comes hard to American writers. It is rare for them to achieve the kind of spontaneous personal identification with an external social order that was characteristic of the 19th-century European novelists.
Warren Coffey
We now have all the work by which Flannery O'Connor will be remembered in the world.
Reviewed by George Kateb
It would be nice to hate Herman Kahn with an easy conscience. But even "On Thermonuclear War (1960)," his first and willfully epatant book, contained some reflections that weakened the urge to write him off as a sadist or a surrealist.
Reviewed by V. S. Pritchett
Mr. Dupee first became known to me through his lucid book on Henry James in the American Men of Letters series. One had seen so many critics chew this subject into a fine powder that it was refreshing to find the master recognizable and whole again.
Reviewed by Lucy S. Dawidowicz
Poul Borchsenius, a Lutheran pastor in Randers, Danish Jutland, was called the "shooting priest" during World War II by the German occupants of his country because he blew up railroad lines connecting Germany and Norway.
Reviewed by Colin Legum
Remarkably little has been learned--least of all by the Belgian business community and their Western friends--about the nature of the political forces engaged in the Congo.
Reviewed by Christopher Lasch
Paul Goodman's latest book, like his earlier ones, tends to divorce the idea of politics from the idea of power.
Theodore Draper
Judging from the experiences of the last three administrations, Latin America might well be designated a disaster area for U.S. policy. During the Eisenhower administration, Fidel Castro came to power. The Bay of Pigs was John F. Kennedy's most humiliating moment. And now President Lyndon Johnson has had his Dominican crisis.
Robert Alter
Israel is probably one of the few remaining countries where verse, far from being a dying technique, has managed to stay at the vital center of literary culture.
Oscar Gass
Americans must never forget that even the most sympathetic associated society will now, quite naturally, approach the United States in the dignified and questioning mood of Milton's Satan: "Whom reason hath equaled, force hath made supreme above his equals."
Robert A. Nisbet
The question of who or what is an intellectual may not be one that would have rocked the Mermaid Tavern or rattled the tables of 18th-century coffee houses, but in our self-conscious age it plainly has commanding importance.
Reviewed by David Daiches
It is impossible to discuss Wiesel's novels in the terms which one would normally employ in reviewing fiction. All his works are clearly autobiographical, directly or indirectly, and they represent a genuine and sometimes painful endeavor to come to terms with post-Auschwitz life.
Reviewed by Andrew Hacker
The reviewers have been noticeably harsher on the 1964 version of "The Making of the President" than they were on its predecessor.
Reviewed by John Mander
For what Howard and West presumably set out to do in "The Road to Number 10" was to write contemporary history. The British title of their book--"The Making of the Prime Minister"--leaves no doubt about their source of inspiration.
Reviewed by Leo Marx
Since Benjamin Franklin's time, the classic theme of American autobiography has been the poor boy's rise in the world, rags to riches, obscurity to renown. All the necessary elements of an old-fashioned success story are inherent in the record of Alfred Kazin's career.
Reviewed by David T. Bazelon
"House Out of Order" was written to stimulate opinion-makers to "inform the American people about the wretched condition of their national legislature."
1965
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