The Stammering Century by Gilbert Seldes: A Parade of Cautionary Tales for Reformers Everywhere
From First ThoughtsEvery swinger, wife-swapper, and key-party enthusiast in the Seventies knew all about Margaret Mead and her liberated South Seas islanders, but I bet that not even a dozen had so much as heard of Fanny Wright or John Humphrey Noyes. That seems to be the way it is with people in the grip of a . . . . Continue Reading »
My review of Prof. Joseph Crespino’s new biography of Strom Thurmond is in the current edition of National Review : The black comedian Dick Gregory said in 1971 that race relations in America were easy to understand: “In the North they don’t care how big I get, long as I . . . . Continue Reading »
From Without a Stitch in Time , a Peter De Vries short story collection: “What I’m going to do is, I’m going to declare moral bankruptcy,” I said. “I mean, we keep using the term in that sense, why not follow it through? When a man can no longer discharge his financial . . . . Continue Reading »
The War in Katanga and the Book of Literary Criticism Indirectly Responsible for It
From First ThoughtsAs far as I know, Conor Cruise O’Brien’s Maria Cross: Imaginative Patterns in a Group of Catholic Writers is the only book of literary criticism ever to be responsible for a war. It was on the basis of this book that Dag Hammarskjöld plucked its author from the Irish delegation at . . . . Continue Reading »
All absolutisms, appropriately enough, are not created equal. It is possible for a man to support one despot but condemn another, or to be a thoroughgoing monarchist at home and a republican elsewhere. A French aristocrat might go to Tsarist Russia and say, with perfect consistency, “I am a . . . . Continue Reading »
This Should Help Us Gauge the Extent of Black Lamb and Grey Falcon’s Anti-Albanian Bias
From First ThoughtsWhen I read Rebecca West’s description of the folk costume of Albanian men, I assumed she was lying or at least exaggerating: No Westerner ever sees an Albanian for the first time without thinking that the poor man’s trousers are just about to drop off. They are cut in a straight line . . . . Continue Reading »
I Can’t Believe I Was Assigned Things Fall Apart in High School and Not This Book
From First ThoughtsAfrican literature has done a great deal to form the conventional wisdom about the cultural side of colonialism, that conventional wisdom being that African societies used to be communitarian, spiritual, and close to nature, but then these virtues were eroded by contact with the individualistic, . . . . Continue Reading »
Yumiko Kurahashi’s The Adventures of Sumiyakist Q (1969) is unlike any anti-Communist novel I have ever read, probably because it is a surrealist Japanese satire of Communism written by a female author, and there is reason to assume it is the only such book in existence. That pile of . . . . Continue Reading »
People who are genuinely concerned about having to face an apocalyptic scenario in their own lifetimes generally fall into one of a few categories. There are evangelical Christians anticipating the Rapture. There are foreign-policy paranoiacs who foresee nuclear war. And there are the . . . . Continue Reading »
Our old friend Ben Hecht has agreed to appear before a literary society in a debate with his friend Maxwell Bodenheim: When the evening arrived, Hecht walked to the foot of the stage and announced that the topic of debate would be—“Resolved: That people who attend literary debates are . . . . Continue Reading »
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