AUTOBIOGRAPHY REVIEWS

In December of 1995, Jean-Dominique Bauby, 43 year old editor in chief of Elle magazine in France, suffered a stroke which severely damaged his brain stem.  After several weeks in a coma, he woke to find that he was one of the rare victims of a condition called "locked-in syndrome" or LIS, which had left his mind functioning but his body almost completely paralyzed.  In a perverse sense he actually got fairly lucky because, unlike most victims, he was still able to move one eyelid.  This allowed him to work out, with a speech therapist, a system of communication which entailed winking as someone slowly read through the alphabet.  By using this code, he could painstakingly spell out words, sentences, paragraphs and, finally, this memoir.

The title of the book refers to the metaphors he uses to describe his situation.  The physical paralysis leaves him feeling as if he was trapped within a diving bell, as if there is constant pressure pinning his body into immobility.  However, at the same time, his mind remains as free as a butterfly and it's flights are as random.  In fact, he calls the chapters of this book his "bedridden travel notes" and, indeed, they eloquently relate his journey through memory.

Although Bauby's situation is obviously unique, this book has universal resonance because his condition is itself an apt metaphor for the human condition.  It is the essence of Man's dilemma that our infinitely perfectible minds are trapped within such weak containers of flesh and blood.  For most of us, at most times, this frustrating dichotomy, between that which makes us godlike and that which makes us mortal, lurks in the background; but the author has it thrust rudely into the foreground, where it necessarily dominates his existence.  This makes it all the more remarkable that Bauby is able to "write" about his life with such great humor and generosity of spirit and with so little bitterness.

Public opinion surveys reveal an interesting contrast in modern opinions on the "right to die."  Contrary to the accepted wisdom, the so-called right is favored by those who are young and healthy, but opposed by those who are old and sick.  The very premise which underlies such a right is the belief that the quality of life experienced by the aged and the ill is so inadequate that they would willingly choose death instead.  In fact, the evidence suggests that--despite the anecdotal horror stories with which all of us are familiar--people generally cling to life even in the face of suffering which seems unendurable to the well.

Bauby's book, for all the horror that we naturally feel at his status, is wonderfully optimistic and life affirming.  Sure, there are a few moments of well earned self pity, but they are almost completely drowned out by the author's enduring hopes and dreams and memories.  Jean-Dominique Bauby died two days after this book was published, but in it's pages, he left behind one of the great testament's to the splendor and majesty of the human spirit.  In these times when people tend to complain about the pettiest matters, he reminds us that even when life is genuinely difficult, it is still quite beautiful and invaluable and well worth living.

GRADE: A+

Dorothy C. Judd's review:

This book could stand on its own as a marvel, but to know that the author, a victim of brain stem injury, wrote it by blinking when alphabet letters were shown to him, is to be humbled and astounded at the indomitable human spirit.  It becomes obvious immediately that the author has always been a keen observer of life, storing the images of all the senses in a mental scrapbook from which he draws, now that he is "locked-in" to his body. Nor does his sense of humor abandon him.  When he describes the hospital's opthamologist, he says, "I wondered whether the hostiptal employed such an ungracious character deliberately, to serve as a focal point for the veiled mistrust the medical profession always arouses in long-term patients.  A kind of scape-goat in other words.  If he leaves Berck, which seems likely, who will be left for me to sneer at?  I shall no longer have the solitary, innocent pleasure of hearing his eternal question: "Do you see double?" and replying - deep inside - "Yes, I see two [editor's deletion--a slang word for anus has been removed], not one."

Although this book is written by womeone in perhaps the saddest and most dire
of human conditions, it is inspiring rather than depressing,  a beautiful piece of writing.

GRADE:   A+

WEBSITES:
    -REVIEW: of THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY By Jean-Dominique Bauby. Translated by Jeremy Leggatt (Thomas Mallon, NY Times Book Review)
    -REVIEW: of  THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY. By Jean-Dominique Bauby  `Locked-in' quadriplegic shares life  (LESLIE SOWERS, Houston Chronicle)
    -REVIEW: (Wendy Cavenett, Between the Lines)
    -REVIEW, EXCERPT, BIO: (Book Browse)
    -REVIEW: My left eye : Jean-Dominique Bauby's memoirs of an imprisoned mind (JULIET WATERS, Montreal Mirror)
    -ANNOTATED REVIEW: (Woodcock, John A., Medical Humanities)
    -REVIEW: (Robert S. Schwartz, M.D., The New England Journal of Medicine)
    -REVIEW: ( Ann Skea, eclectica)

    Distinctions by race are so evil, so arbitrary and insidious that a state bound to defend the equal
    protection of the laws must not allow them in any public sphere.
           -Thurgood Marshall, Brown v. Board of Ed (1954)

    I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by
    the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
           -The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., I Have a Dream

    Waiting to be checked through the White House security area on the afternoon of December 19,
    1997, I thought about distances. Even though I am black and he is white, for instance, in many
    respects I felt quite close to the president I would soon be meeting. Both of us are from the South
    and from the generation that finally escaped the burdens of Southern history. Both of us are from
    painfully broken homes, and both were saved by powerful maternal figures who had, in their
    desperate struggles to keep from slipping further down in class, somehow managed to set us each on
    a course of achievement. And yet we were also very far apart, not because we were from different
    races, but because of our different views on race. And here the vast distance between us was filled
    with irony: Bill Clinton's views had led him to be praised by people such as novelist Toni Morrison
    as "our first black president," while mine had led people of Morrison's political outlook to attack me
    as "a white man with black skin."

    I also had a sense of the distance we have traveled as a nation, of what a long and tortured road we
    have walked in our search for racial fairness and how, in recent times, we seemed to have doubled
    back again on our own tracks. A generation ago, when Martin Luther King Jr. stood in roughly the
    same spot I was standing in, waiting to be ushered into the Oval Office, he brought with him a
    simple and eloquent plea for equal treatment under the law for all Americans, black and white. The
    presidents he spoke toóJohn Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, men who until reaching high office
    never really questioned the malicious racial myths of their dayóagreed with him and committed the
    government to King's great cause. But now, after almost forty years of national introspection and
    determined civic and political action had made America a different country from what it had been,
    the situation was reversed. I had come to Washington to reaffirm King's message, but I knew I
    would be opposed by a president who, although he claimed that his views had been formed by the
    moral urgencies of the civil-rights movement, nonetheless insisted that race mattered even more
    today than it did in the distant past, and that equality under the law was no longer enough.
        -Ward Connerly, Creating Equal

There was a time when public figures with significant views on the great issues of the day would write pamphlets or treatises, even short books, detailing their positions.  One thinks, for instance, of such writers as Thomas Paine and Alexander Hamilton at the time of the Founding, or in recent decades of Barry Goldwater's great book The Conscience of a Conservative, or William Simon's A Time for Truth.  These are all polemical works, meant to argue for political positions, which, though intensely personal, are uncluttered by personality.  They served an essential public service by addressing vital questions in a brief and readable form.  As a result, they were widely read and quite influential.

Today, at a time when even White House pets have bestselling memoirs, these kinds of arguments are now grafted on to autobiographical texts for no discernible reason other than to exploit the current trend in publishing.  It was with some trepidation then that I approached Ward Connerly's book, Creating Equal.  I admire him and the battle he has waged over the past decade, but I honestly expected to skim through the typically pro forma story of his life to get to the meatier sections where he would present the intellectual case against racial preference programs.  But an unexpected thing happened on the way through the boring bits; it turns out that, though much of his tale is familiar, Ward Connerly's own life experience is one of his best arguments.

As is common in American society, and only getting more so, Connerly comes of mixed racial stock : Black, White, and Native American.  He is "Black" only by the terms of the ancient and racist "one drop rule" and by family tradition; in reality his race defies categorization.  He did not meet his father until very late in life and, his mother having died, was raised first by an aunt and uncle, then by his grandmother.  His grandmother and uncle were the real formative influences on his character, both of them strict and demanding that he make something of himself.  His Uncle James in particular was a role model, asking only one thing of life : that people treat him like a man; in exchange always carrying himself like one.  Together they instilled in Connerly a burning desire to be judged on his own merit.

It thus seems natural that when, as a member of the University of California Board of Regents, Connerly was approached by a couple who had statistical evidence of the use of quotas by the UC colleges, he turned their cause into his cause.  His account of the battle for Proposition 209, the California Civil Rights Initiative, and then subsequent contests in Washington, Texas and Florida, make for interesting reading, though they are perhaps not as viscerally powerful as the story of his early life.

Throughout the book, Connerly is animated by a simple timeless creed which gives the book its title :

    I celebrated July 4 1995 with a heightened awareness of the personal freedom at the core of
    nationhood.  When the Founding Fathers said that we were all created equal, they were proposing an
    audacious theory that ultimately inflamed the rest of the world.  By fits and starts, Americans had
    tried to make that theory into a reality, with abolitionism, the Emancipation Proclamation, and, of
    course, the civil rights movement, which instituted sweeping revisions of the law that have brought
    us ever closer to the fulfillment of the promise of our national life.  I felt in my heart that race
    preferences--by whatever name--were not a continuation of that progress, but an obstacle in the road
    to freedom and equality.  At best a diversion, and at worst a giant step backward, affirmative action
    preferences caused us to lose sight of the task we inherited from the Founders--creating equal as the
    only category that counts in America.

There's a deep irony in the fact that these beliefs, traceable to Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence and Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech, should now make Ward Connerly anathema to the Democratic Party and to the institutionalized civil rights movement.  We have reached a sad point in our nation's history where to the inheritors of the legacy of Jefferson and King the idea of a color blind society has been transmuted into a weird kind of racism itself.  It should not have required courage to, as Connerly boldly does, advocate that race be ignored in awarding government jobs and contracts, but it did, and this demonstration of courage makes Connerly into a heroic figure, willing to brave epithets, threats and hatreds to vindicate his convictions.  This memoir, harkening back to The Autobiography of Ben Franklin and Booker T. Washington's Up From Slavery, partakes of the great American tradition of self-reliance and the demand that each of us be judged individually; this gives it an impact all out of proportion to what I expected.

GRADE : A

Buy Creating Equal at Amazon.com

WEBSITES :
    -American Civil Rights Institute :  a national civil rights organization created to educate the public about racial and gender preferences
    -BOOKNOTES : Title: Creating Equal: My Fight Against Race Preferences  Author: Ward Connerly (C-SPAN, Sunday, April 30th, 2000)
    -EXCERPT : from Creating Equal : A Day at the White House (Ward Connerly,  Heterodoxy | February - March 2000)
    -ESSAY : Subsidizing illegal residents (Ward Connerly, February 5, 2002)
    -ESSAY : In love with affirmative action (Ward Connerly and Edward Blum, May 2001, Washington Times)
    -ESSAY : My Fight Against Race Preferences: a Quest Toward 'Creating Equal' (WARD CONNERLY, Chronicle of Higher Education)
    -ESSAY : Why I'm Still Fighting Preferences in Florida (Ward Connerly, Wall Street Journal | November 18, 1999)
    -ESSAY : A Battle, and an Opportunity : Make a stand with Ashcroft (Ward Connerly, National Review)
    -ESSAY : Affirmative amnesia (Ward Connerly, Washington Times)
    -DISCUSSION : TALKING ABOUT RACE with Ward Connerly & Linda Chavez (Online Neshour, PBS, December 19, 1997)
    -DISCUSSION : Using Class Rank as a Substitute for Affirmative Action (Chronicle of Higher Education)
    -DISCUSSION : Black Business Leaders Ask: Is It Time to Set Quotas Aside? (Ward Connerly, Daniel Colimon, and Herman Cain, Policy Review)
    -ARCHIVES : Salon.com Directory | Ward Connerly  A complete listing of Salon articles on Ward Connerly
    -Regent Biography: Ward Connerly (University of California)
    -ESSAY : Ward Connerly's New Cause : The man who ended affirmative action in California is pushing for a colorblind government. (Michael Lynch, Reason)
    -PROFILE : Heroes : Ward Connerly (Daily Objectivist)
    -PROFILE : Ward Connerly & the American Civil Rights Institute (A Briefing Paper prepared by Right Watch, a Project of A Job is a Right Campaign. Phil Wilayto, Media Transparency)
    -PROFILE : Ward Connerly : Black millionaire leads charge to undo civil rights legacy (J.B. McCampbell, about ...time Magazine, November-December 1997)
    -PROFILE : Ward Connerly Says... "[Al Gore] is a hateful man and I don?t often use terms like that..."  (Cris Rapp, National Review)
    -PROFILE : What Hath Ward Wrought? :  Ward Connerly holds his nose in support of Gov. Jeb Bush's plan. (Jessica Gavora, National Review)
    -ESSAY : FAIRNESS OR FOLLY? : WARD CONNERLY BRINGS HIS CAMPAIGN AGAINST AFFIRMATIVE ACTION TO A WIDER STAGE JUST AS CLINTON ROLLS OUT A NEW SET OF RACE INITIATIVES (ERIC POOLEY, TIME)
    -ESSAY : Mister Connerly comes to Florida : Ward Connerly wants to end racial preferences in a key state. Fearing a backlash, Jeb Bush and other Republicans think he should stay in California. Are they right? (Bill Duryea, American Spectator)
    -ARTICLE : Ward Connerly visits Umass  (Isabel Lyman, May 2001, Enter Stage Right)
    -REVIEW : of Creating Equal (Dan Seligman, Commentary)
    -REVIEW : of Creating Equal by Ward Connerly (Noemie Emery, Weekly Standard)
    -REVIEW : of Creating Equal ( Karina Rollins,  FrontPagemag.com)
    -REVIEW : of Creating Equal (PHILIP A. KLINKNER , The Nation)
    -REVIEW : of Creating Equal by Ward Connerly Ward Connerly's Newest Whine :  Affirmative action's most irritating critic gripes that shelving his book with others on African American topics will hurt sales. We can only hope. (Michele Landis, Mother Jones)
    -RESPONSE : Readers React :  Read Ward Connerly's response to this article, a selection of reader letters, and Michele Landis' rebuttal (Mother Jones)
    -REVIEW : of Creating Equal (Christopher Rapp, American Outlook)
    -REVIEW : of Creating Equal (PETER ORVETTI, Libertarian Party News)
    -REVIEW : of Creating Equal: My Fight against race preferences (Richard Kahlenberg, Washington Monthly)

GENERAL :
    -Citizen's Guide to the Affirmative Action Debate (Claremont Institute)
    -New Democracy Forum: Rethinking Affirmative Action  (Susan Sturm and Lani Guinier, Boston Review)
    -ARTICLE : Minority Applications to UC Rise : Education: Blacks and Latinos post double-digit percentage increases. Figures counter concerns about affirmative action's end, but also reflect changing ethnic makeup of high schools. (KENNETH R. WEISS, LA Times Education Writer)
    -ROUNDTABLE : Race in America : If there is a race problem in America today, what is it? Atlantic Unbound has invited The Atlantic's Nicholas Lemann and a panel of distinguished commentators to take up this question -- one of the central, most divisive of our time (Atlantic Monthly)
    -ARTICLE : Magazine for the Black Intelligentsia (RICHARD BERNSTEIN, NY Times, August 14, 1991)
    -ARTICLE : AFFIRMATIVE ACTION UPHELD BY HIGH COURT AS A REMEDY FOR PAST JOB DISCRIMINATION (STUART TAYLOR Jr., Special to the New York Times, July 3, 1986)
    -EXCERPTS FROM JUSTICES' OPINIONS IN AFFIRMATIVE ACTION CASES; STEET METAL WORKERS' PLAN (Special to the New York Times, July 3, 1986)
    -ESSAY : As Goes California...  Still the leader---ominously so (John O'Sullivan, National Review)
    -REVIEW : of Losing The Race Self-Sabotage in Black America. By John H. McWhorter (David J. Dent , NY Times Book Review)
    -ESSAY :  "One Florida"- Many Problems : Governor Jeb Bush seemed to be making progress removing race and gender  preferences-but then politics happened. (Matthew Rees, Weekly Standard)
    -ESSAY : The Near Myth of Our Failing Schools : Ideologically inspired lamentations about the parlous state of American education mask the much more complex truth  (Peter Schrag, Atlantic Monthly)
    -PROFILE : Orlando Furioso : Harvard's contentious sociologist speaks his piece on the nation's racial dialogue: You're all wrong. (Tom Scocca, Boston Phoenix)
    -REVIEW : of The Trouble with Principle By Stanley Fish (Katha Pollitt, NY Times Book Review)
    -REVIEW : of A CONFLICT OF RIGHTS The Supreme Court and Affirmative Action. By Melvin I. Urofsky (Ethan Bonner, NY Times Book Review)
    -REVIEW : of Sovereign Virtue The Theory and Practice of Equality. By Ronald Dworkin (Alan Ryan, NY Times Book Review)
    -English for the Children : Let's teach English to all of California's children and end bilingual education by June 1998.
    -PROFILE : The Thernstroms in Black and White (Adam Shatz, The American Prospect)
    -PROFILE : The "Loyalty Trap": Glenn Loury, once a neoconservative luminary, reverses course (Norman Podhoretz, National Review, January 25 1999)
    -In Motion Magazine : a multicultural, online U.S. publication about democracy
    -EXCERPT : Chapter One of I May Not Get There with You: The True Martin Luther King Jr.
 By Michael Eric Eric Dyson

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius : Based on a True Story (2000) (Dave Eggers)

You've got to give Dave Eggers this, if nothing else, he knows how to market himself.  First he wrote this memoir, loaded with irony to appeal to Gen-Xers, continually self-referential to appeal to postmodernists, and centered around his efforts to raise his little brother after their parents both died of cancer, a sure chick magnet.  Then, having exposed most of his and his family members' lives to public view (at least in theory) he adopted a Pynchonesque/Sallingeresque reclusive pose, and feigned personal agony at having to discuss the book.  All this while cashing in big time on the supposedly "tragic" events of his life.  For these savvy ploys alone he deserves to be called a "staggering genius."

The book itself uses a host of postmodernist, ironical, satirical, self-conscious, etc., etc., etc...techniques, which are rather hackneyed and, given the ostensible topic of the book (his family tragedy), quite off-putting.  A fairly representative passage comes when he's heaving his mother's ashes (or cremains) into Lake Michigan :

    Oh this is so plain, disgraceful, pathetic--

    Or beautiful and loving and glorious!  Yes, beautiful and loving and glorious!

    But even if so, even if this is right and beautiful, and she is tearing up while watching, so
    proud--like what she said to me when I carried her, when she had the nosebleed and I carried her
    and she said that she was proud of me, that she did not think I could do it, that I would be able to
    lift her, carry her to the car, and from the car into the hospital, those words run through my head
    every day, have run through every day since, she did not think I could do it but of course I did it.  I
    knew I would do it, and I know this, I know what I am doing now, that I am doing something both
    beautiful but gruesome because I am destroying its beauty by knowing that it might be beautiful,
    know that if I know I am doing something beautiful, that it's no longer beautiful.   I fear that even
    if it is beautiful in the abstract, that my doing it knowing that it's beautiful and worse, knowing that
    I will very soon be documenting it, that in my pocket is a tape recorder brought for just that
    purpose--that all this makes this act of potential beauty somehow gruesome.  I am a monster.  My
    poor mother.  She would do this without the thinking, without the thinking about thinking--

Yeah sure, I get it, the way he's having this discussion shows that he understands what's going on, yadda, yadda, yadda...  But unfortunately, the point he's making is more accurate than his style is clever.  There simply is something gruesome about this kind of mannered irony and the way, throughout his life, that he seems to interpret his experiences through the filter of the book he plans to write.

At the point where every thought, emotion, and action in your life must be considered for how it will appear in print, you've become a fictional character rather than a real human being.  And by creating so much distance between the character of Dave Eggers and the supposedly tragic events of his life, Eggers (the author) makes it really hard for the reader to care much.  I finished the book unstaggered and heart unbroken, but grudgingly forced to admit that the literary world has a potential new genius, a writer with a genius for self promotion the likes of which we've not seen since Norman Mailer; and we all know how the Norman Mailer story has gone : badly.

GRADE : C-

Buy Heartbreaking Work at Amazon.com

WEBSITES :
    -McSweeney's
    -EXCERPT : First Chapter of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
    -REVIEW : of The! Greatest! of! Marlys! By Lynda Barry (Dave Eggers, NY Times Book Review)
    -REVIEW : of Adopting Alyosha A Single Man Finds a Son in Russia. By Robert Klose (Dave Eggers, NY Times Book Review)
    -REVIEW : of Trail Fever by Michael Lewis (David Eggers, Salon)
    -INTERVIEW :   Dave Eggers on creativity in the wake of tragedy.  (KAREN E. STEEN | December 2001, Metropolis)
    -Dialog : Of Editors and Adding Machines André Schiffrin's new book argues that an  army of statisticians and business men is killing publishing. We've invited him, John Donatich and Dave Eggers to conduct an autopsy (FEED)
    -INTERVIEW : Brother Knows Best : Dave Eggers talks, with some reluctance, about the staggering work of being a genius parent. (Amy Benfer , Salon)
    -PROFILE : It's Work, It's Heartbreaking, But Is It Genius? : Dave Eggers brings his hip literary roadshow to Ridgefield (Joe Miksch, 02/21/02 , New Mass Media)
    -PROFILE : Cracking Eggers (Douglas Wolk, Village Voice)
    -PROFILE : A Wry Survivor of a World That Fell Apart Finds a Quick Celebrity (SARAH LYALL, 2/10/2000, NY Times)
    -PROFILE : Dave Eggers Turns His Memoir Upside Down (DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK, February 14, 2001, NY Times)
    -ARTICLE : Bestselling Author Dave Eggers Assails New York Times Writer Over Profile : The writer of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius airs his complaints by publishing his entire e-mail correspondence with a reporter. He also says that off-the-record comments were used without his permission. (PJ Mark, Inside.com)
    -ESSAY : Culturebox Rules: Dave Eggers vs. David Kirkpatrick Who's right, the wounded memoirist or the exposed journalist?  (Eliza Truitt, Slate)
    -ESSAY : When the tiff gets going...  A hissy feud between novelist Dave Eggers and a New York journalist highlights the love-hate relationship of celebrity and press (Peter Conrad, March 11, 2001,  The Observer uk)
    -PROFILE : Eggers Surprised By Success  (James Sullivan, SF Chronicle)
    -PROFILE : A man of the people :  He refuses to meet with the media, but Dave Eggers invites fans to write poetry at his readings and buys them all drinks afterward (KIM CURTIS, April 25, 2001, Globe & Mail)
    -PROFILE : The agony and the irony :  He's the hottest literary star in America and he's  written a best-selling memoir about raising his kid brother after his parents' death. Is Dave Eggers for real?   (Stephanie Merritt, The Observer)
    -PROFILE : Bedsit genius charms US : A reclusive publishing sensation is being hailed as the new William Burroughs (Ed Vulliamy, The Observer)
    -PROFILE : Searching for the real Dave Eggers : Author of bestseller A heartbreaking work of staggering genius, Dave Eggers is notoriously distrustful of the media, refusing all telephone and in-person interview requests, It is a policy that gives rise to some unusual rumours. Who is the real Dave Eggers? (Kim Curtis, The Age)
    -ESSAY : The Null Set : Is the postmodern fiction of Dave Eggers and David Foster Wallace a literary dead end? Or  is there a way out of the funhouse? Keith Gessen looks for clues. (FEED)
    -ESSAY : A staggeringly post-modern work  of literary trickery  : Stephen Moss assesses the critical reaction to Dave Eggers's A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (The Guardian)
    -ESSAY : Too Cool for Words : Books, shmooks! The whole book-publishing business takes itself too seriously.  (JUDITH SHULEVITZ, NY Times Book Review, May 6, 2001)
    -ARCHIVES : "dave eggers" (Mag Portal)
    -ARCHIVES : "dave eggers" (Find Articles)
    -ARCHIVES : "dave eggers" (Salon)
    -ARCHIVES : "dave eggers" (The Guardian uk)
    -REVIEW : of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers (Michiko Kakutani, NY Times)
    -REVIEW : of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius By Dave Eggers (2000) (Sara Mosle, NY Times Book Review)
    -REVIEW : of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius By Dave Eggers (William Corbett, Boston Phoenix)
    -REVIEW : of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (Brian Dillon, Richmond Review)
    -REVIEW : of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers (Robert Hanks, booksonline uk)
    -REVIEW : of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers (Raymond Seitz, booksonline uk)
    -REVEW : of A Heartbreaking Work (New Statesman, William Georgiades)
    -REVIEW : of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers (Alexander Star, New Republic)
    -REVIEW : of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers (Dan Savage, Salon)
    -REVIEW : of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers : Come to the cabaret : Failed at TV? Try writing. Adam Begley on Dave Eggers' disarming talent for self-publicity .  (July 15, 2000, The Guardian)
    -REVIEW : of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers (KEN WINLAW -- Toronto Sun)
    -REVIEW : of "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius" by Dave Eggers (Mark Lindquist, Seattle Times)
    -REVIEW : of A Heartbreaking Work (Brian Dillon, Richmond Review)
    -REVIEW : of Heartbreaking Work (Ashley Fantz, MEMPHIS FLYER)
 

An Obsession with Anne Frank : Meyer Levin and the Diary (1997)(Lawrence Graver)

I've no idea why I hadn't read--nor, considering the fact I went to a predominantly Jewish High School, why someone hadn't required me to read--Anne Frank's great memoir, Diary of a Young Girl.  I suppose it just seemed like it would be too depressing.  Our school had left little to the imagination; in 9th grade we saw films of the liberated death camps--the horribly emaciated survivors, the gruesome piles of corpses, the piles of hair and eye glasses, the showers, the ovens...  They made damn sure we knew exactly what went on in Nazi Germany.

In the years since, I've read plenty of books on the Holocaust.  I've seen the requisite movies and mini-series and documentaries.  What is it then about Anne Frank's story that filled me with such dread?  In retrospect, it's easy to figure out.  The telling of the story of the Holocaust so often seems to start and end with the six million dead.  It is a horror so massive that even after all the books and movies it is just too awesome to comprehend.  The sheer size and criminal audacity of the slaughter somehow makes it seem unreal.

The story of Anne Frank, on the other hand, begins with a teenage girl, her family and some friends hiding in an attic.  The Holocaust, though it's menace is omnipresent, is far in the background.  It is this girl who is real, her experience immediate.  And it ends abruptly, on August 4, 1944, without Nazis, without death camps, without dogs, without barbed wire, without gas chambers.  The diary just ends.  Yet, somehow, this only serves to make the story all the more powerful.  Consider only what is between the covers.   At the end of the book, here is all you know : this perfectly normal, perhaps even gifted, teenage girl was killed for no other reason than that she was Jewish.  In the most affecting passages of the book, she herself futilely tries to understand how her lightly held Jewish beliefs can have led to this dire circumstance.  No one reading the diary could ever perceive her as any kind of threat.  It is just not possible to imagine that she is evil.  Take only the best known passage from the diary:

    It's really a wonder that I haven't dropped all ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to
    carry out. Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good
    at heart. I simply can't build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and
    death. I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever approaching thunder,
    which will destroy us too, I can feel the suffering of millions, and yet, if I look up into the heavens,
    I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty, too, will end, and that peace and tranquillity will
    reign again.

What conceivable purpose could ever be served by destroying the child who wrote those impossibly idealistic words?  And so, the Holocaust, which is so hard to wrap your mind around when you consider the six million, becomes real and personal and all the more horrific when we consider just one of it's victims.  By it's very specificity the book takes on universal qualities.

Of course, this is the reaction this book has provoked since the day it was published, or at least one of the reactions.  The question of whether it is the only or the most justifiable reaction led to a truly bizarre and tragic coda to the story, which Lawrence Graver relates in the terrific book, An Obsession with Anne Frank.  Meyer Levin was a moderately successful mid-Century novelist (perhaps best known now for Compulsion, a novelization of the Leopold and Loeb murder case) .  Though raised in Chicago, he was a dedicated Zionist and, despite or because of feelings of persecution and inferiority, was fiercely proud of his Jewish heritage, a descendant of shtetl Jews from Eastern Europe.  As World War II wound down, working as both a journalist and a filmmaker, he documented some of the first survivors stories of the death camps.  He grew certain that this was to be his mission in life: to present to the world the story of the fate of Europe's Jews.  So when he first read the Diary, he recognized that here was the ideal medium through which to reach a mass audience.

He established contact with Anne Frank's father, Otto, who had survived the War and been responsible for publication of the original expurgated diary.  Levin was helpful, he claimed instrumental, in getting the book published in America and even hoodwinked the New York Times into letting him write their review--which was naturally a glowing review, running some 5000 words.  In exchange, Frank gave him the right to take the first crack at adapting the book for the stage.  Here's where the trouble began.

Otto Frank was a cosmopolitan, Europeanized Jew.  He envisioned the Diary as a universal text.  Levin, on the other hand, was interested in it specifically as it related to the Jewish Holocaust experience.  So Levin produced a draft which was considered a good start and stageable, but it was by no means up to the quality of the big money treatment the show was going to get.  After much wrangling, Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, non-Jews best known for their It's a Wonderful Life script, were brought in and it was they who wrote the familiar version which was first staged in 1955.  Levin was enraged by what he saw as an attempt to freeze him out, to even further reduce the Jewish elements of the story and by what he came to believe was an actual conspiracy to achieve these goals, a conspiracy in which he eventually included everyone from Lillian Hellman to Otto Frank himself.  Eventually he filed several law suits and even sued Otto Frank.  The whole matter became an obsession which consumed the remaining quarter century of his life, estranged him from friends and unsettled his family.

This story is fascinating on it's own, but read in conjunction with the Diary, it raises really interesting questions about how the story should be understood.  Is it in fact a good thing that the story is so universal, or should it really put more emphasis on the Holocaust as a unique event and a fundamentally Jewish experience?  Must these events be understood as a function of a particular time and place or are they part of a larger human pattern?  What is the meaning of Anne Frank's life and her too early death?  And who gets to decide these questions, her father and family or the larger community of Jews or the reader himself?

This book adds a definite texture and nuance to the story, but the Diary certainly stands on it's own as a great work of literature and a vital document of one of history's darkest chapters.  It is all the more remarkable for having been written by a teenager under such oppressive circumstances.

GRADE: A

An Obsession with Anne Frank: GRADE: B+

Meyer Levin (1905-81)
    -Compulsion (1956)

WEBSITES:

LAWRENCE GRAVER:
    -Lawrence Graver (Williams College English Department Faculty)
    -REVIEW: of THE REMAINS OF THE DAY By Kazuo Ishiguro (Lawrence Graver, NY Times Book Review)
    -REVIEW: of READING AMERICA Essays on American Literature. By Denis Donoghue  (Lawrence Graver, NY Times Book Review)
    -REVIEW: of ACROSS By Peter Handke. Translated by Ralph Manheim (Lawrence Graver, NY Times Book Review)
    -REVIEW: of SELECTED LETTERS OF E. M. FORSTER Volume Two: 1921-1970 (Lawrence Graver, NY Times Book Review)
    -REVIEW: of SCENES FROM MARRIED LIFE and SCENES FROM LATER LIFE By William Cooper (Lawrence Graver, NY Times Book Review)
    -ARTICLE: Anne Frank's diary still generates controversy (Howard Kissel, New York Daily News)
    -REVIEW: Feb 19, 1998 Ian Buruma: The Afterlife of Anne Frank, NY Review of Books
        The Diary of Anne Frank a play by Frances Goodrich, Albert Hackett
        An Obsession with Anne Frank: Meyer Levin and the Diary by Lawrence Graver
        The Stolen Legacy of Anne Frank: Meyer Levin, Lillian Hellman, and the Staging of the Diary by Ralph Melnick
    -REVIEW of AN OBSESSION WITH ANNE FRANK Meyer Levin and the Diary By Lawrence Graver (Richard Bernstein, NY Times)
    -REVIEW: of AN OBSESSION WITH ANNE FRANK Meyer Levin and the Diary. By Lawrence Graver (Frank Rich, NY Times Book Review)
    -REVIEW: of The Stolen Legacy of Anne Frank Meyer Levin, Lillian Hellman, and the Staging of the ''Diary.'' By Ralph Melnick (Robert Leiter , NY Times Book Review)

ANNE FRANK (1929-45)
    -Anne Frank Online
    -Anne Frank (1929-1945)(kirjasto)
    -ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA: Your search: "anne frank"
    -Anne Frank House
    -Anne Frank Center USA
    -Anne Frank Diary Reference
    -Anne Frank on Broadway
    -Anne Frank: Lessons in Human Rights and Dignity (St. Petersburg Times)
    -Anne Frank Webquest
    -Anne Frank : Victim of the Holocaust (Miami-Dade County Teachers Association)
    -Miep Gies : Keeping Anne Frank's Story Alive (MSNBC)
    -Anne Frank In the World: 1929-1945
    -LINKS : The Anne Frank Internet Guide
    -LINKS : Anne Frank Resources (The Franklin Institute)
    -Anne Frank and Oskar Schindler in Memoriam
    -Nicole's Anne Frank Page
    -The Anne Frank Page  (Chooi Mei & Michelle)
    -BOOKNOTES: Author: Melissa Muller  Title: Anne Frank: The Biography Air date: November 29, 1998 (CSPAN)
    -ONLINE STUDY GUIDE: The Diary of Anne Frank by Anne Frank (SparkNote by Debra Grossman)
    -PROFILE: TIME 100 : Heroes & Icons : Anne Frank (Roger Rosenblatt, TIME)
    -ARTICLE: Anne Frank's diary still generates controversy (Howard Kissel, New York Daily News)
    -ESSAY: Anne Frank, On and Off Broadway (Molly Magid Hoagland, Commentary)
    -ESSAY: ANNE FRANK WAS NOT ALONE: HOLLAND AND THE HOLOCAUST
(Anthony Anderson, University of Southern California)
    -ESSAY: Anne Frank: the Cultivation of the Inspirational Victim  (Catherine A. Bernard, Women Writing the Holocaust)
    -ESSAY: Writing Herself Against History: Anne Frank's Self-Portrait as a Young Artist (Rachel Feldhay Brenner, Modern Judaism)
    -BOOK LIST: The New York Public Library's Books of the Century

HOLOCAUST
    -ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA: Holocaust
    -A Teacher's Guide to the Holocaust (Florida Center for Instructional Technology)
    -Nizkor Project (Your Holocaust Educational Resource)
    -Survivors of the Shoah : Visual History Foundation
    -The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
    -Simon Wiesenthal Center
    -Holocaust History Project
    -A Cybrary of the Holocaust (remember.org)
    -The Mazal Library : A HOLOCAUST RESOURCE
    -Museum of Jewish Heritage (Manhattan, NY)
    -Yad Vashem Home Page
    -Braun Holocaust Institute of the Anti-Defamation League
    -I*EARN'S Holocaust/Genocide Project : Youth Using Telecommunications to Make a Difference in the World
    -The Holocaust: A Tragic Legacy (ThinkQuest project on the history and legacy of the Holocaust)
    -Holocaust Survivors
    -Holocaust Memorial Center (Detroit, USA)
    -Memorial Museums for the Victims of National Socialism in Germany
    -The Holocaust Album : A Collection of Historical and Contemporary Photographs
    -The Nuremberg War Crimes Trials (The Avalon Project at the Yale Law School)
    -World War Two in Europe (History Place)
    -Documentary Resources on the Nazi Genocide and its Denial
    -LINKS: Holocaust Resources on the World Wide Web (Stanley Feldberg)
    -LINKS: meyer's holocaust links, 3rd ed
    -Literature of the Holocaust (Al Filreis, English 293, U of Penn)
    -Museum of Tolerance
    -REVIEW: Mar 9, 2000 Eva Hoffman: The Uses of Hell, NY Review of Books
        The Holocaust in American Life by Peter Novick
    -REVIEW: Sep 28, 1989 Istvan Deak: The Incomprehensible Holocaust, NY Review of Books
        Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? The "Final Solution" in History by Arno J. Mayer
        The Kraków Ghetto and the Plaszów Camp Remembered by Malvina Graf
        Some Dare to Dream: Frieda Frome's Escape From Lithuania by Frieda Frome
        Double Identity: A Memoir by Zofia S. Kubar
        Life With a Star by Jirí Weil
        From That Place and Time: A Memoir, 1938-1947 by Lucy S. Dawidowicz
        The Jews and the Poles in World War II by Stefan Korbonski
        And I Am Afraid of My Dreams by Wanda Póltawska
        Doctor #117641: A Holocaust Memoir by Louis J. Micheels, M.D.
        Eva's Story: A Survivor's Tale by the Step-Sister of Anne Frank by Eva Schloss
        Unbroken: Resistance and Survival in the Concentration Camps by Len Crome
        Lódz Ghetto: Inside a Community Under Siege
        Soldiers of Evil: The Commandants of the Nazi Concentration Camps by Tom Segev
        The Holocaust in History by Michael R. Marrus
        Unanswered Questions: Nazi Germany and the Genocide of the Jews edited by Francois Furet
        Modernity and the Holocaust by Zygmunt Bauman
    -ARCHIVES: "Holocaust" (NY Review of Books)
    -REVIEW: Was the Holocaust a unique evil that must be studied for its lessons, or a promotional tool used to mobilise support for Israel? David Cesarani weighs up two points of view: THE HOLOCAUST AND COLLECTIVE: The American Experience By Peter Novick & THE NAZI TERROR: Gestapo, Jews & Ordinary Germans By Eric Johnson (London Times)
    -REVIEW: "The Holocaust in American Life" and "The Americanization of the Holocaust" : Two books ask how -- and why -- a European catastrophe became central to American culture. (JESSE BERRETT, Salon)

MEYER LEVIN  (1905-1981)
    -ESSAY: Re-writing "Anne Frank" - A distorted legacy (Jonathan S. Tobin, Jewish World Review)
    -REVIEW: of Martin Litvin, Audacious Pilgrim. The Story of Meyer Levin (William L. Urban, The Zephyr Online)
    -Leopold & Loeb Trial Home Page (Doug Linder, UMKC Law School)
    -REVIEW: of COMPULSION (1959)(And You Call Yourself a Scientist!)
    -REVIEW: Feb 20, 1964 Stanley Kauffmann: Season In Hell, NY Review of Books
        Blood From the Sky by Piotr Rawicz
        The Fanatic by Meyer Levin

    Nowadays I have finally grasped a proposition that seems obvious: that a writer has a duty to say
    what is wrong about life in his country and a duty, also, to say what is right.  When the status quo is
    good you had better defend it, or you will wake up one morning and it will be gone.
        -David Gelernter, Drawing Life

There is something especially perverse about the fact that Yale professor David Gelernter, a man who is extremely ambivalent about modernity himself, should have been a target of the Unabomber.  (It seems likely that he was targeted simply because of his work in the computer sciences and some favorable mentions in the New York Times, from which the Unabomber is suspected of having gleaned prospective victims.)  In this angry, completely idiosyncratic, often funny, polemic Gelernter recounts his recovery from the bomb blast that nearly killed him and did leave him with severely damaged hands, vision and hearing problems and a multitude of other ailments, but, alongside this story of survival, he also deconstructs the modern culture of intellectual elites, moral relativism, permissiveness, and political correctness, and ties the two together by arguing that phenomena like the Unabomber are made possible, or at least increasingly pervasive, by the failure of our society any longer to render judgment on evil.

The story of Gelernter's rehabilitation largely focuses on his family and friends and on his abiding passion for painting, music and writing.  Gelernter is not merely a patron of these arts, he is a creator of all three.  In fact, though his hand injuries limited his ability to paint and play the piano for several years, during this time he did amazingly manage to complete three books.

But the real thrust of this book is his disgust with modern culture.  There is not much new in his argument--it borrows, wittingly or no, from E. B. White, George Orwell, Jacques Barzun,F. A. Hayek, Paul Johnson, and other conservative critics--as he traces the decline of societal morality back to the surrender by WASP elites and their succession by intellectuals.  He understands full well that in many ways it was a good thing to move to a system that is based more on merit than on heredity, that the tolerance which is the central value of intellectuals has been beneficial to society in many regards, and that equality of opportunity for women and minorities has been in most ways a good thing.  But he is also quite blunt about the downside inherent in all of these trends.

As he argues, the meritocratic elite has turned the education system from a finishing school for gentlemen into a training ground for intellectuals, that is people who believe in the pure power of ideas to remake humanity and in the special role of intellectuals in making decisions for humanity.  Tolerance, an initial good as it opened doors for people and allowed for the free exchange of even unpopular ideas, has degenerated into an ethic of "anything goes."  Toleration has removed any standards of behavior and has delegitimized the judgment of ideas and behaviors.  What started as a refreshing openness to differences has been pushed to an extreme where we no longer seem to recognize the difference between good ideas and bad ideas or between true good and genuine evil, or if we do recognize it, somehow no longer feel confident in our right to judge between the two.

In several extremely opinionated and politically incorrect passages he tackles questions of gender equity, race, gay rights, etc., in light of this understanding.  But the book is brought full circle when he examines the events of his own life: modern attitudes towards crime, the sensationalist press, and the celebrity culture.  In perhaps the strongest and most memorable few paragraphs of the book Gelernter considers whether his own religious beliefs should mitigate against his desire to see the Unabomber pay for his crimes with his life:

    I would sentence him to death.  And I would commute the sentence in one case only, if he repents,
    apologizes and begs forgiveness of the dead men's families, and the whole world--and tells us how
    he plans to spend the whole rest of his life pleading with us to hate the vileness and evil he
    embodied and to love life, to protect and defend it, and tell us how he sees with perfect agonizing
    clarity that he deserves to die--then and only then I'd commute his sentence...

At one point in the book, Gelernter reflects on a friend's assertion that he is an "extreme right-winger" because "you believe, he told me, that society is better off--other things being equal--if mothers stay home and rear their children than if they get jobs."  And that is indeed an extreme opinion in today's culture, though becoming less so.  But what really sets Gelernter apart and places him squarely in the extreme conservative camp are the dual ideas above: first, that he is capable of judging the Unabomber evil and is entitled to render a death sentence upon him; second, that a murderer's crimes place a burden, not upon society to justify the death sentence, but upon the criminal himself.

Think about the last few executions that death penalty activists have made a fuss about.  In none do they actually argue that the death penalty is wrong, instead they trump up excuses for the convict.  The idea that a criminal should have to recognize the nature of his crimes, take responsibility for them and beg society to forgive him, is completely foreign to these proceedings.  In a funny way, Gelernter's position takes these men seriously in a way that their advocates do not.  The activists are merely trying to spare their wretched lives, Gelernter's position takes into consideration their souls and demands that they try to redeem themselves.

As in this specific case, Gelernter's musings generally point out one of the great ironies of modern life: to believe in the inherent value of women in their role as mothers (their central role for thousands of years); to believe that members of every race, creed and gender can compete on equal grounds in the academy and the economy; to believe that every individual is responsible for his own actions; all of these beliefs today qualify one as an uncaring, insensitive, radical right-winger.  But believe instead that motherhood is a waste of time and a form of bondage; believe that certain groups of people can only compete if government gives them some advantage; believe that no one is truly responsible for anything they do, that societal and familial forces dictate their actions; and you will be hailed as a decent, caring, enlightened humanist.

But of course, it is the first world view--traditional liberalism, now called conservatism--that made possible the progress of women and minorities and even intellectuals in the first place.  However, as the old hereditary elite willingly yielded their exclusive position of power, they also unwittingly yielded to the victimology of the new intellectual class and so allowed the destruction of what was best about their own culture, even as they admitted new members to it's hallowed ground.  Conservatives then are reactionary, but not in the sense that they want to return to exclusivity, rather in that they want to restore the values that made their culture so desirable to outsiders to begin with--individual freedom, individual responsibility, equality of opportunity for all but without guarantee of result, and a set of universally recognized absolute standards of conduct that apply to everyone.

Gelernter often casts a covetous eye back towards the America of the 30's and 40's, to a time when these ideals did permeate the culture and helped to glue the admittedly imperfect society of the day together.  In a certain sense, this quirky memoir traces two explosions, the one that nearly killed him and the much larger one that has blown that America apart.  His personal story is one of relying upon family, friends, traditional values and the great works of Western Civilization to nurse himself back to full spiritual health.  The question is: will this same prescription ever be applied to our shattered culture and similarly restore it to full health?

GRADE: A-

Buy Drawing Life at Amazon.com

WEBSITES:
    -David Gelernter : Professor of Computer Science (Yale University)
    -Lifestreams Project
    -Mirror Worlds Technologies
    -BOOKNOTES: Title: Drawing Life Guest: David Gelertner (November 16, 1997, CSPAN)
    -EXCERPT: HOW I SURVIVED THE UNABOMBER  BY DAVID GELERNTER (TIME)
    -REVIEW : of America Before TV: A Day in Radio, September 21, 1939. Edited by Paul Brennecke (David Gelrnter, Weekly Standard)
    -ESSAY: How the Intellectuals Took Over  (And What to Do About It) (David Gerlernter, Commentary)
    -EXCERPTS: from Machine Beauty by David Gelernter (The Atlantic)
    -REVIEW ESSAY: Cyberwar's Literary Fallout Rivals the Cyberwar (DAVID GELERNTER, NY Times Book Review)
    -OP/ED: PUT DOWN THAT CALCULATOR, STUPID! (DAVID GELERNTER, NY Post)
    -OP/ED: What's at Stake in Kosovo (David Gelernter, NY Post)
    -OP/ED: Gay Rights and Wrongs (DAVID GELERNTER, Wall Street Journal)
    -INTERVIEW: SURVIVING THE UNABOMBER  David Gelernter survives a Unabomber attack and the press that covered it. (November 4, 1997, Online Newshour Forum, PBS)
    -GERGEN DIALOGUE: SURVIVING THE UNABOMBER (OCTOBER 16, 1997, Online Newshour, PBS)
    -INTERVIEW: Digital Culture : The World According to David Gelernter An interview with a computer scientist who argues that beautiful technology -- and a return to traditional values -- must show us the way forward (Harvey Blume, January 29, 1998, The Atlantic)
    -EDGE Third Culture: David Gelertner
    -ESSAY: THE SECOND COMING - A MANIFESTO Everything is up for grabs. Everything will change. There is a magnificent sweep of intellectual landscape right in front of us.  (David Gelernter, Edge)
    -INTERVIEW: Omni Chat : Eileen Gunn and David Gelertner (Omni Magazine)
    -INTERVIEW: Hotwired Hotseat Surviving the Unabomber (John McChesney, Hotwired)
    -INTERVIEW: David Gelernter: The InterMinds Interview  (David Bennaham, interminds)
    -VIDEO INTERVIEW: David Gelernter (100 Years of Innovation, Business Week)
    -PROFILE:    Rage on the Right (Paul Bass for the Advocate)
    -PROFILE: An Angry, Happy Man (George F. Will, Thursday, September 18, 1997, The Washington Post)
    -LETTER: Text of Letter from Unabomber to Dr. David Gelernter
    -ESSAY: Lifestreams : According to David Gelernter, the desktop metaphor is obsolete. He wants to move beyond space - to time. (Steve G.Steinberg, Wired)
    -ESSAY: RETURN OF THE 50-FOOT POINTY-HEADS : There's only one way to stop the attack of them thar Alienated Intellectuals -- bring back the Vassar Girl!  (GARY KAMIYA, Salon)
    -ESSAY: Truth, Beauty, and the User Interface: Notes on the Aesthetics of Information (Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, Department of English University of Virginia)
    -REVIEW: of DRAWING LIFE Surviving the Unabomber By David Gelernter  (RICHARD BERNSTEIN, NY Times)
    -REVIEW: of Drawing Life Surviving the Unabomber. By David Gelernter (Alan Ehrenhalt, NY Times Book Review)
    -REVIEW: of Drawing Life : Surviving the Unabomber (Susan Jackson, Business Week)
    -REVIEW: of Drawing Life (SCOTT McCONNELL, National Review)
    -REVIEW: of Drawing Life RECOVERING FROM A BLAST (Eli Lehrer, The American Enterprise)
    -REVIEW: of Drawing Life (ADAM MAZMANIAN, Mindspring)
    -REVIEW: of Drawing Life The Trial of the Unabomber: A Moral Guide (Diana Furchtgott-Roth, Intellectual Capital)
    -REVIEW : of Drawing Life by David Gelernter  Encounter with a Madman (Diana Furchtgott-Roth, Intellectual Capital)
    -REVIEW: of 1939 The Lost World of the Fair By David Gelernter  (CHRISTOPHER LEHMANN-HAUPT, NY Times)
    -REVIEW: of 1939 The Lost World of the Fair. By David Gelernter (David Nasaw, NY Times Book Review)
    -REVIEW: Lost World of the Future : Looking back at the 1939 New York World's Fair, David Gelernter's "novel with an index" exposes the irrevocable link between technology and nostalgia. (Jon Katz. Wired)
    -REVIEW: of  MACHINE BEAUTY Elegance and the Heart of Technology By David Gelernter  (CHRISTOPHER LEHMANN-HAUPT, NY Times)
    -REVIEW: of Machine Beauty : Elegance and the Heart of Technology By David Gelernter (Susan Jackson, Business Week)
    -REVIEW: of Mirror Worlds Or the Day Software Puts the Universe in a Shoebox How It Will Happen and What It Will Mean By David Gelernter (CHRISTOPHER LEHMANN-HAUPT, NY Times)
    -REVIEW: of Mirror Dreams by David Gelernter (Sohodojo)
    -REVIEW: of The Muse in the Machine: Computerizing the Poetry of Human Thought by David Gelernter (Caitlin Kelly, November 1996)
 

GENERAL:
    -The Unabomber Trial (The Sacramento Bee)
    -ESSAY: Republican Disarray (Gary Wills)
    -ESSAY: "Victimizers" (Cathy Young, The New Republic)

    This is the story of a duel.

    It is a duel between two very unequal adversaries: an exceedingly powerful, formidable, and ruthless state and an insignificant, unknown private
    individual.
        -Sebastian Haffner, Defying Hitler

It is, I think, fair to say that few questions bewilder us more than how the Germans, a civilized and modern people, could have murdered seven million in the Holocaust and how the victims can have let it happen to them.  For a long time our need to rebuild and maintain West Germany as a bulwark against communism led us to engage in the fundamental untruth that the crimes must have been committed by a relatively tiny band of genuinely mad men.  But Jonah Goldhagen shattered that myth with his book Hitler's Willing Executioners.  Of course it must have taken an enormous number of participants for the machinery of death to function and nearly everyone in German society must have been touched in some way, touched and for the most part they chose to do nothing to stop it.  Yet even as this forced us to be more honest, in some senses it only deepened the mystery: what was it that had happened to an entire society to make it so sick?  What can have gone on in the mind of what presumably must have been many decent people to make them become such monsters or to accept the monstrousness that was going on around them?

In recent years there has, entirely appropriately, been an avalanche of memoirs by Holocaust survivors.  Their side of the horror has been well told.  But there are, at least to my knowledge, fairly few good memoirs by run-of-the-mill Germans.  And any written after the war must be somewhat suspect, because by then it was clear how much there was to explain away or even to hide.  All of which only serves to make this book, which would be remarkable regardless, an invaluable addition to our understanding of the era.

Sebastian Haffner is the pen name of Raimund Pretzel, a journalist and historian who fled to London in 1938, not because he was Jewish or faced persecution for any other reason, but because he was disgusted by what was happening in a Germany fallen under the spell of Hitler and Nazism, a spell whose tug he too had felt, but resisted.  He began this account of his experiences right away, before war had even broken out, but then set it aside to work on a less personal look at Nazism.  It was only after his death that his son, Oliver Pretzel, who also serves here as his translator, found the manuscript, in such disarray that this version includes chapters that did not appear in the original German bestseller just two years ago.  The story covers the period from when his earliest memories begin, appropriately enough and germane to the story, at the beginning of the Great War, until 1933, when his Jewish friends are already having trouble leaving the country.  When it leaves off he has begun his writing career, but as per his father's wishes he is also training in the legal profession.  He came from conservative, middle class, Aryan stock, and, had the times been different, it seems likely he would have been content to follow in his civil servant father's footsteps.  But times were very different.

Mr. Haffner traces Germany's long descent into Nazism from the Great War itself, when boys like he learned to revel in the excitement, even the bloodlust, of war.  The war was then followed by revolution, ruthlessly suppressed, and the Weimar years when the best leaders, like Rathenau, were murdered, and those who remained failed to secure the struggling democracy.  This tumult too conditioned people to expect excitement and even mayhem out of political life.  Already during this period Mr. Haffner identifies the precursors of the Nazis, in the Free Corps, which put down the German Revolution and disposed of all the revolutionary organizations.  But the Free Corps did not seek power for itself and Mr. Haffner suggests that they did not for uniquely German reasons:

    As Bismarck once remarked in a famous speech, moral courage is, in any case, a rare virtue in Germany, but it deserts a German completely
    the moment he puts on a uniform.  as soldier and officer, he is indisputably and outstandingly courageous on the field of battle.  He is even
    prepared to open fire on his own compatriots if ordered to do so.  Yet he is as timid as a lamb at the thought of opposing authority.
    The suggestion of such a confrontation always conjures up the nightmare of a firing squad and he is immediately paralyzed.  It is not death
    he fears, but this particular death, which scares him out of his wits.  That makes any idea of insubordination or a coup d'etat altogether
    impossible for the German military--whoever happens to be in power.

Recall that he was writing before WWII, but in the coming years he must not have been at all surprised at the way the vaunted German military allowed itself to be disgraced and degraded with nary a peep.

Mr. Haffner traces the roots of Nazism to the year 1923 which began with the confrontation over the Ruhr with the French and then continued with the bouts of hyperinflation.  He says that this served to make Germans cynical and nihilistic as they lost all their savings and the very concept of money basically lost any meaning.  The world around them became absurd and they in turn became absurdists.  As a result, when normalcy was finally restored it tended to seem boring to people.

One of the most attractive and yet frightening characters in the book is Mr. Haffner's father, who seemingly combined all that is best and worst about the German:

    He was by conviction a liberal and by stance and disposition a Prussian puritan.

    There is a specifically Prussian variant of puritanism that was one of the most important spiritual forces in German life before 1933 and still
    plays a certain role beneath the surface.  It is related to classical English puritanism but has some characteristic differences.  Its prophet is Kant
    rather than Calvin; its greatest standard-bearer, Frederick the Great rather than Cromwell.  Like English puritanism it demands severity, dignity,
    abstinence from the pleasures of life, attention to one's duty, loyalty, honesty, indeed self-denial, and a somber scorn for the world. [...]
    Prussian puritanism is, however, secular.  It serves and owes allegiance to, not Jehovah, but the roi de Prusse.  Its distinctions and earthly
    rewards are not private wealth, but promotion in the civil service.  Perhaps the most important difference is that Prussian puritanism has
    a back door into unsupervised freedom.  It is marked "private." [...]

    As a nation, Germany leads a double life because almost every German leads a double life.

These are fateful differences.  The secularity and the devotion to the state rather than to God leave Germans susceptible to ethical relativism and the morality of brute force.  The notion of a duality to life--of a public self and a private self--allows them to disassociate themselves from the action of the state, indeed from the actions they undertake themselves in the name of the state.  Together, as we can clearly see in retrospect, these differences lay the groundwork for a civil service that will obey any orders.

And so the elements are in place for the rise of Hitler and the Nazis in 1933: a people addicted to excitement and adjusted to violence; a people marked by moral cowardice with a military that won't rescue them; a civil service that will follow any authority and civil servants capable of distancing themselves from their official duties.  From there on the nightmare unfolds as Hitler plays on these weaknesses like a virtuoso.

Mr. Haffner explains most of this in the form of asides; the bulk of the book is devoted to his own personal experiences.  In the final portion of the book he shares his disgust as the legal profession, like all aspects of life, is taken over and corrupted by the Party.  In one horrifying scene from his social life, a friend--I think you'd have to call him a friend--with whom he and four other young men had long shared discussions announces cold-bloodedly that he's considered turning Haffner in to the authorities as a subversive.  It's clear that the threat he'll do so remains.  Yet this done in a leisure setting among comrades, as if it were the most natural thing in the world to betray people to the Nazis.  If Mr. Haffner had not made up his mind yet about the future of Nazi Germany and about his own bleak prospects in such a place it seems certain that moment crystallized things for him.

It's impossible to overstate how good this book is, particularly when you consider that it was a mere draft for a larger work and is a translation.  Somehow it remains immensely readable.  Mr. Haffner's prescient insight into the German character and his first hand observations about the details of life as Germany Nazified are fascinating and quite disturbing.  One doubts we can ever truly "know" how these events can have happened, particularly the Holocaust, but Mr. Haffner gets us as close as we've ever been to understanding.  It is an essential book.

GRADE: A+

Buy Defying Hitler at Amazon.com

WEBSITES:
    -BOOK SITE: Defying Hitler: A Memoir (Written Voices)
    -EXCERPT: Chapter One of Defying Hitler
    -REVIEW: of Defying Hitler (GABRIEL SCHOENFELD, NY Times Book Review)
    -REVIEW: of Defying Hitler (Max Hastings, Daily Telegraph)
    -REVIEW: of Defying Hitler (Antony Beevor, Daily Telegraph)
    -REVIEW: of Defying Hitler (Daniel Johnson, Commentary)
    -REVIEW: of Defying Hitler (Steven Martinovich, Enter Stage Right)
    -REVIEW: of Defying Hitler (Theo Richmond, The Spectator)
    -REVIEW: of Defying Hitler (Charles Taylor, Salon)
    -REVIEW: of Defying Hitler (Allen Weakland, ALA Book List)
    -REVIEW: of Defying Hitler (Lincoln Wright, Sydney Morning Herald)
    -REVIEW: of Defying Hitler (Roger K. Miller, The Denver Post)
    -REVIEW: of Defying Hitler (Clay Risen, Flak Magazine)
    -REVIEW: of Defying Hitler (Shane Cory, Washington Dispatch)
    -REVIEW: of Defying Hitler (Gerhard Altmann, English Historical Review)
    -REVIEW: of Defying Hitler (MARY-LIZ SHAW, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel)
    -REVIEW: of Defying Hitler (W.J. Rayment, Conservative Monitor)
    -REVIEW: of Defying Hitler (Peter G. Pollak, Empire Page)

GENERAL:
    -REVIEW: of HITLER AND THE POWER OF AESTHETICS By Frederic Spotts (Rupert Christiansen, The Spectator)

I kept hearing really good things about the movie October Sky, so, though I didn't know much about the story, I rented it eagerly.  It is indeed an old-fashioned crowd pleaser, an almost Capraesque throwback to the great American films of the 40's.  It tells the story of four boys from a West Virginia coal town, a company town right out of Tennessee Ernie Ford's great song Sixteen Tons.   In a football crazed high school, none of the boys is a very good athlete.  Quentin, in fact, is a bookish nerd shunned by the rest of his classmates.  Homer, their ringleader, decides, in the wake of the Sputnik launch, that they will build a rocket of their own.  After some initial misfires, including demolishing his mother's prized picket fence, and despite the initial resistance of Homer Sr., who manages and truly loves the mine, the boys eventually enlist the aid of the whole community in their project and enjoy increasing success even as the town dies around them.  They even determine to try and win the National Science Fair and the attending scholarships which will offer them an opportunity to get out of town.  But their plans are smashed when local authorities accuse them of starting a forest fire with one of their rockets and when Homer's Dad is injured in a mine collapse, he drops out of school and goes to work in the mine.  But that of course is not the end of it, while working in the mines, Homer teaches himself the mathematics required to prove that the fire could not have been set by one of their launches.  Vindicated, he returns to school and goes on to win the big prize.  Along the way, he even finds time to reconcile with his Dad.  The movie is exactly as hokey and sappy as it sounds and I loved every second of it.

But as you're watching, it is awfully hard to suspend your disbelief enough to accept that this is a "true" story.  There are simply too many coincidences and ironic twists, folks are just that little bit too noble, events break a little too conveniently, until the unreality of the flow of events starts to impinge on enjoyment of the tale.  Don't get me wrong; I still liked it, but that "true story" label was really distracting.

At any rate, my curiosity piqued, I grabbed the book and found this epigraph:

    I have...taken certain liberties in the telling of the story, particularly having to do with the precise
    sequence of events and who may have said what to whom.  Nevertheless, my intention in allowing this
    narrative to stray from strict nonfiction was always to illuminate more brightly the truth.
        -Homer Hickman, Jr., Author's Note

Now, there was a time when virtually every author's first novel was understood to be a thinly veiled autobiographical tale.  Unfortunately, our voyeuristic society seems to place a premium on "reality" and so these novels have been replaced by obligatory memoirs.  These books are immediately suspect because they so often recreate huge swathes of dialogue verbatim, often conversations which occurred in childhood, which no one could possibly remember in such detail.  And, of course, real life is seldom quite as interesting as fiction and events never happen as conveniently for the plot, so each succeeding memoir relates events that seem increasingly less likely.  I mean, does anybody really think that Frank McCourt (see Orrin's review of Angela's Ashes) got his grubstake by rolling an expired money lender?  So at this point, when these supposedly true stories have become so obviously fictionalized, why continue this charade?

Hickman's book is at least honest enough to tip the reader off that "liberties" have been taken.  The story that follows is great fun--a cross between How Green Was My Valley (1939)(Richard Llewellyn 1906-1983)   (Grade: A+) and The Right Stuff (1979)(Tom Wolfe 1931-)    (Grade: A+)--and is not quite as unbelievable as the movie.  One wishes that some editor somewhere would have the great good sense and the simple honesty to call a spade a spade and acknowledge that books like this are in fact novels.  Drop the "Memoir" in the title and make an honest man of the author.  Then we can just concentrate on the tale he has to tell, which is terrific.

GRADE: A-

MOVIE: GRADE: A

Buy Rocket Boys and October Sky at Amazon.com

(N.B. Zachary Barnett points out that October Sky is an anagram for Rocket Boys.)

WEBSITES:
    -Homer Hickam's Official website
    -official site for the Original Rocket Boys, the O.R.B. for short
    -ESSAY: The Big Creek Missle Agency: The short story in AIR&SPACE that  became the movie October Sky. (Homer H. Hickam Jr., Air & Space)
    -ESSAY: How I Came to Write the Memoir: Rocket Boys (Homer H. Hickam, Jr.)
    -ESSAY: Time to be Great Again (Homer Hickam, Wall Street Journal)
    -ESSAY: The Contrabandistas: They were a ragged gang of pilots smuggling goods into Mexico in a risky night-flight operation. They call themselves...  (Homer H. Hickam Jr., Air & Space)
    -SPEECH: The Rocket Boys: Passion, Planning, and Perseverance- West Virginia University Commencement Speech, Morgantown, WV.
    -PROFILE: "Star Struck" October Sky hero, Homer Hickam, left home on his way to the heavens.  (Kyle Smith, Grace Lim (in Huntsville), People)
    -INTERVIEW: BookPage Interview September 1998: Homer H. Hickam, Jr. (Christopher Lawrence, Book Page)
    -INTERVIEW: Homer H. Hickam Jr. Interview   (Norman Julian, The Morgantown Dominion Post)
    -ESSAY: Rocket Boys (Mark Toor, Wonderful West Vireginia)
    -Coalwood Today
    -The National Association Of Rocketry
    -Rocketry Online
    -Space.com
    -REVIEW: ROCKET BOYS A Memoir. By Homer H. Hickam Jr. (Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, NY Times)
    -REVIEW: ROCKET BOYS A Memoir. By Homer H. Hickam Jr. (James R. Gaines, NY Times Book Review)
    -REVIEW: Coal miner's son had other plans (Deirdre Donahue, USA TODAY)
    -REVIEW:    (Norman Julian, The Morgantown Dominion Post)
    -REVIEW: (Terry Lawson, Knight Ridder News Service)
    -REVIEW: of BACK TO THE MOON By Homer H. Hickam Jr. (Anita Gates, NY Times Book Review)
    -REVIEW: of   ROCKET BOYS: A Memoir. By Homer H. Hickam Jr Rocketing to the top of the world (THOMAS FENSCH, Houston Chronicle)
    -REVIEW : of Sky of Stone: A Memoir by Homer Hickman (Steve Galpern, Rocky Mountain News)

FILM:
    -BUY IT: DVD (Amazon.com)
    -BUY IT: VHS  (Amazon.com)
    -The official October Sky website- Official site from Universal Pictures.
    -The October Sky Study Guide
    -ESSAY: Intelligence in the Movies: The Case of "October Sky" (David M. Brown, The Objectivist Daily)

    The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.
           -Milan Kundera, as quoted by David Horowitz

Winston Churchill's old aphorism, "any man under thirty who is not a liberal has no heart, and any man over thirty who is not a conservative has no brains", though it contains a great deal of truth, also misleads.  It does so by its implication that liberalism, as a belief of the young, is a function of being uninformed and emotional, while conservatism, as a belief of the old, comes only with experience and a dying out of passion.  This gives both sides too little credit : liberalism is intellectually defensible, just as conservatism is consistent with compassion.  The fault line that separates the two philosophies lies not along an age barrier but between two central human concerns, the competing desires for security and freedom.  History is nothing more than a long struggle of the one against the other, with a tendency towards equilibrium.

What Churchill's dictum successfully pinpointed is that the true believers on either side, by pushing their ideals to their logical ends, wind up seeming either naively utopian, the Left, or callous, the Right.  Modern Liberalism, with its exclusive concern for economic security and its tendency towards state imposed equality, seems brainless to us both because it doesn't work and because the political system that produced Churchill and us has tended to favor the other side.  That other side--which we now call conservatism but which is really classical liberalism--with its exclusive focus on maximizing freedom, appears heartless because it contemplates allowing some, perhaps most, people to fail, rather than intervene to save them from themselves.  It is not at all surprising that the battle between these world views should be so polarized because at their extremes they really are mutually exclusive : equality (of results, not of opportunity) is simply incompatible with freedom.

Churchill's formulation also points up a curious phenomenon : no one ever makes the conversion from conservative to liberal; the traffic is all in the opposite direction.  This does not make liberalism any less valid a viewpoint, but it does suggest that it represents a temperament which one either has at an early age, or will never have, and that it can not be arrived by the application of reason and logic.  In some sense you are born believing that security from the vicissitudes of life should be man's paramount ideal, regardless of the means necessary to obtain this end, or you are not.  Conservatism, on the other hand, is a birthright of some, but it can also be arrived at via intellectual endeavor, or simply by perusing the evidence of liberalism's failure.  That is, people arrive at conservatism as a function of faith, of thought, or by trial and error.  All are welcome, but there are important differences between them, differences which are clearly evident in David Horowitz's book, Radical Son, particularly by comparison to Whittaker Chamber's great memoir, Witness, to which it is often, unwisely, compared..

I like David Horowitz's writing well enough; his column for Salon is amusing and his publications, Front Page and Heterodoxy are valuable resources.  In particular, I appreciate his uncanny ability to get under the skin of his former comrades on the Left; no other conservative columnist is attacked so frequently and vituperatively.  And I think Radical Son has some value, especially for Horowitz's inside portrayal of the radical Left in the 1960's and 70's.  But, at least for me, it fails as a chronicle of Horowitz's conversion and it appears especially weak alongside Witness. Radical Son is a self-justification and a boast, Witness was a self-mortification and a warning.

Though he was a red-diaper baby and a Marxist himself, Horowitz asks the reader to believe that at virtually every step of his political life he entertained profound doubts about the beliefs and methods of those around him.  As these moments pile up--especially when he is working for the Black Panthers--it becomes increasingly difficult to believe his veracity.  It is of course possible that his career of extremism was accompanied all along by these myriad gnawing doubts, but it is much more likely that today's conservative Horowitz looks back on the young radical Horowitz with such disdain that he transfers today's doubts to the past.

Then as Horowitz makes his break with the Left and undertakes a slow drift to the Right, he is so bent on preserving the self-image that he used to have, that he is never able to fully embrace what he's become.  His conversion is couched almost completely in terms of the violence, intolerance, and failures of the Left.  His acceptance of conservative approaches to problems is always cast solely in terms of a kind of utilitarianism and accompanied by profuse avowals of his continued passion for social justice.   In the end, he seems to want to believe that he is essentially unchanged, that he has always simply been in search of the good of others, that he once believed that Marxism would provide that good, but that its failures and the concurrent successes of conservatism convinced him otherwise.  So he changed sides without ever actually changing his core beliefs.  Here's a fairly representative quote :

    I make no apologies for my present position.  It was what I thought was the humanity of the Marxist
    idea that made me what I was then; it is the inhumanity of what I have seen to be the Marxist
    reality that has made me what I am now.

Of course the Marxist idea is to take from those who have and give it to those who don't; the "humanity" of this can not be simply accepted, whether such action is humane and just lies at the core of the argument.  But this tortured formulation does, not coincidentally, allow him to portray himself as not a dupe when he was on the Left and not heartless now that he's on the Right.  The whole thing is hugely dishonest and smacks of a man who can't face either what he was or what he is.

Compare Horowitz's story, as many of the critics did, to the story Whittaker Chambers had to tell in Witness.  Chambers began his memoir with a letter to his children (available online and well worth reading in its entirety), wherein he sought to explain his conversion :

    I was a witness. I do not mean a witness for the Government or against Alger Hiss and the others.
    Nor do I mean the short, squat, solitary figure, trudging through the impersonal halls of public
    buildings to testify before Congressional committees, grand juries, loyalty boards, courts of law. A
    man is not primarily a witness against something. That is only incidental to the fact that he is a
    witness for something.  A witness, in the sense that I am using the word, is a man whose life and
    faith are so completely one that when the challenge comes to step out and testify for his faith, he
    does so, disregarding all risks, accepting all consequences.

This stands in stark contrast to Horowitz both because Chambers states his case in the positive, rather than as a mere reaction to the excesses and failures of the Left, and because his conversion, unlike Horowitz's, came at a time when the conclusion of the struggle was still in doubt.  It is easily forgotten today, and many have reason to hasten our forgetfulness, but when Chambers abandoned communism in the mid 1940's it still had forty years to run as a serious contender with democracy, especially among elite opinion.  As late as the early 1980s academics and intellectuals still thought that Communism might eventually triumph, but were at least certain that it would continue as a viable political/economic alternative.  In fact, when Chambers switched sides he thought he might well be leaving the winning team to join the losing.  By the time Horowitz moved to the Right, Ronald Reagan was president and Communism, if not yet recognizably doomed, was on the run.  His switch, though sensible, required none of the moral courage that Chambers displayed.

Fairly or not then, Horowitz comes across as a man whose political conversion came at little personal expense and is not deeply felt nor well considered.  No principles are involved; it is all on the surface.  Here again it is helpful to look at what Chambers wrote in his letter :

    One thing most ex-Communists could agree upon: they broke because they wanted to be free. They
    do not all mean the same thing by "free." Freedom is a need of the soul, and nothing else. It is in
    striving toward God that the soul strives continually after a condition of freedom. God alone is the
    inciter and guarantor of freedom. He is the only guarantor. External freedom is only an aspect of
    interior freedom. Political freedom, as the Western world has known it, is only a political reading of
    the Bible. Religion and freedom are indivisible. Without freedom the soul dies. Without the soul
    there is no justification for freedom. Necessity is the only ultimate justification known to the mind.
    Hence every sincere break with Communism is a religious experience, though the Communist fail to
    identify its true nature, though he fail to go to the end of the experience. His break is the political
    expression of the perpetual need of the soul whose first faint stirring he has felt within him years,
    months or days before he breaks. A Communist breaks because he must choose at last between
    irreconcilable opposites-- God or Man, Soul or Mind, Freedom or Communism.

    Communism is what happens when, in the name of Mind, men free themselves from God. But its
    view of God, its knowledge of God, its experience of God, is what alone gives character to a society
    or a nation, and meaning to its destiny. Its culture, the voice of this character, is merely that view,
    knowledge, experience, of God, fixed by its most intense spirits in terms intelligible to the mass of
    men. There has never been a society or a nation without God. But history is cluttered with the
    wreckage of nations that became indifferent to God, and died.

    The crisis of Communism exists to the degree in which it has failed to free the peoples that it rules
    from God. Nobody knows this better than the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The crisis of
    the Western world exists to the degree in which it is indifferent to God. It exists to the degree in
    which the Western world actually shares Communism's materialist vision, is so dazzled by the logic
    of the materialist interpretation of history, politics and economics, that it fails to grasp that, for it,
    the only possible answer to the Communist challenge: Faith in God or Faith in Man? is the
    challenge: Faith in God.

    Economics is not the central problem of this century. It is a relative problem which can be solved in
    relative ways. Faith is the central problem of this age. The Western world does not know it, but it
    already possesses the answer to this problem--but only provided that its faith in God and the freedom
    He enjoins is as great as Communism's faith in Man.

Chambers, contrary to the assumptions inherent in Churchill's bon mot, burned with passion, a passion for Freedom.  At its most basic, conservatism is indeed a belief that "freedom is a need of the soul;" this need, so evident in Witness, does not similarly burn within the soul of the David Horowitz revealed in Radical Son.  Therefore, while the book succeeds as an indictment of the Left, it fails utterly as a statement of faith.

GRADE : C

Buy Radical Son at Amazon.com

WEBSITES :
    -BOOKNOTES : Author: David Horowitz Title: Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey Air Date: April 13, 1997 (C-SPAN)
    -EXCERPT : from 'Radical Son" by David Horowitz :Scenes from the 60's
    -The Center For The Study Of Popular Culture
    -FrontPage Magazine
    -Heterodoxy
    -ARCHIVES : David Horowitz (Salon)
    -ARCHIVES : "David Horowitz" (Jewish World Review)
    -Political War : The War Room (David Horowitz)
    -ARCHIVES : David Horowitz (Upstream)
    -INTERVIEW : Interview with David Horowitz ( June 6, 1997, Chuck Baldwin Live)
    -ESSAY : Ten Reasons Why Reparations for Blacks is a Bad Idea for Blacks - and Racist Too (David Horowitz, FrontPageMagazine.com | January 3, 2001)
    -ARTICLE : To Print Or Not To Print: Ad Kindles Outrage (ANDREW S. HOLBROOK, Crimson)
    -ESSAY : Late night with David Horowitz The conservative columnist defends his views in the former Mecca of free speech. No chairs are thrown, but somebody pulls the plug (Cary Tennis, Salon)
    -ESSAY : Mob Rules: Horowitz vs Censorship (Wendy Kaminer, The American Prospect)
    -INTERVIEW : Free Speech in the University : Conservative writer tweaks with campus politics over issue of reparations (NEWSWEEK)
    -PROFILE : Master manipulator mounts phony campaign about slavery : Rewriting  history in the name of free speech (Eric Alterman, MSNBC)
    -RESPONSE : Alterman's Deliberate Distortion :  A letter to MSNBC's Eric Alterman (Stephen Brooks, FrontPageMagazine.com | March 28, 2001)
    -ARTICLE : Editorial is no paper tiger (ROBERT STERN, Trenton Times)
    -EDITORIAL : A message to our readers (Daily Princetonian, Wednesday, April 4, 2001)
    -ESSAY : I Didn't Buy A Gratuitous Slander : Horowitz Responds to the Wall Street Journal (FrontPageMagazine.com | April 10, 2001)
    -ESSAY : Who's afraid of the big bad Horowitz? By refusing to run his ad blasting reparations for slavery, cringing campus journalists are giving the racial provocateur publicity that money can't buy (Joan Walsh, Salon)
    -ESSAY : Indeed He Is Risen! (Paul Weyrich, Free Congress, April 13, 2001 )
    -ESSAY : Who Killed Christ? (Evan Gahr, American Spectator)
    -ESSAY : Weyrich Assailed for Citing Jews in Christ's Death  (Thomas B. Edsall, Washington Post)
    -ESSAY : Blinded by the right :  A prominent conservative  leader makes an anti-Semitic comment, and his colleagues on the right look the other way. (Joe Conason, Salon)
    -ESSAY : A slip of the tongue : Paul Weyrich offended Jews with his recent column, but is it  worth burying his career over a single statement in a 40-year public life? (David Horowitz, Salon)
    -ESSAY : Face facts : David Horowitz accused me of lying, but he's the one who plays loose with the facts on Reagan-era conservatism. (Joe Conason, Salon)
    -ESSAY : Back to Our Roots (David Horowitz, National Review, May 13, 1991)
    -ESSAY :  Guns don't kill black people, other blacks do : The NAACP's ludicrous idea to sue gun manufacturers is yet another attempt by the left to avoid personal responsibility for some individuals' bad behavior. (David Horowitz, Salon)
    -OPED : A Real-Life Bigot : A  former leftist earns a place on the wild-eyed right  (Jack E. White, TIME)
    -RESPONSE : David Horowitz responds to Time magazine's "slander"  (David Horowitz, Salon)
    -RESPONSE : Camille Paglia defends David Horowitz : The Salon columnist slams the editors behind Time's attack on Horowitz for their "late summer slip-up." (Camille Paglia, Salon)
    -PROFILE : David Horowitz's Long March (SCOTT SHERMAN, The Nation)
    -PROFILE : Looking for Mr. Right : Who's Running the Conservative Club in Town? (DAVID CORN, The Nation)
    -PROFILE : David Horowitz: Sore Winner (Jack Shafer, Slate)
    -DOSSIER : david horowitz (disinformation)
    -ESSAY : The Chorus and Cassandra (Christopher Hitchens,  Grand Street Magazine, Autumn 1985)
    -ESSAY : A Drudge Report : Net gossipmonger Matt Drudge got sued after running a libelous story about a liberal Clinton aide. L.A. conservative gadfly David Horowitz came to his rescue. (Denise Hamilton, Phoenix New Times)
    -REVIEW : of RADICAL SON A Journey Through Our Times. By David Horowitz (Richard Gid Powers, NY Times Book Review)
    -REVIEW : of Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey by David Horowitz (James Bowman, National Review)
    -REVIEW : of  Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey   by David Horowitz (Christopher Caldwell, Commentary)
    -REVIEW : of Radical Son (Stephen Goode, The Washington Times)
    -REVIEW : of Radical Son (Bob Kolasky, Intellectual Capital)
    -REVIEW : of Radical Son (WILLIAM NORMAN GRIGG, THE NEW AMERICAN)
    -REVIEW : of Radical Son  World's Oldest Red Diaper Baby Tells All (John J. Reilly)
    -REVIEW : of Destructive Generation Second Thoughts About the 60' By Peter Collier and David Horowitz (Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, NY Times)
    -REVIEW : of Destructive Generation Second Thoughts About the 60' By Peter Collier and David Horowitz (David Burner, NY Times Book Review)
    -REVIEW : of  THE KENNEDYS An American Drama. By Peter Collier and David Horowitz
(Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, NY Times)
    -REVIEW : of THE KENNEDYS An American Drama. By Peter Collier and David Horowitz (Ted Morgan, NY Times Book Review)
    -REVIEW : of THE FORDS. An American Epic. By Peter Collier and David Horowitz (Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, NY Times)
    -REVIEW : of THE FORDS. An American Epic. By Peter Collier and David Horowitz (Joseph Nocera, NY Times Book Review)
    -REVIEW : of THE ROOSEVELTS An American Saga. By Peter Collier with David Horowitz (John A. Garraty, NY Times Book Review)
    -REVIEW : of THE ROOSEVELTS An American Saga. By Peter Collier with David Horowitz (Janet Maslin, NY Times)
    -REVIEW : of Hating Whitey: And Other Progressive Causes by David Horowitz (Josh London, American Spectator)
    -REVIEW : of  Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes by David Horowitz (Robert A. George, Intellectual Capital)
    -REVIEW : of The Race Card - White Guilt, Black Resentment, and the Assault on Truth and Justice Edited by Peter Collier and David Horowitz (Brad Zuber, Intellectual Capital)
    -REVIEW : of UNCIVIL WARS: The Controversy Over Reparations for Slavery, By David Horowitz (ALAN M. DERSHOWITZ, LA Times)

1960'S :
    -REVIEW : of POLITICAL PASSAGES Journeys of Change Through Two Decades 1968-1988. Edited by John H. Bunzel (Charles Paul Freund, NY Times Book Review)
    -REVIEW : of America Divided The Civil War of the 1960s. By Maurice Isserman and Michael Kazin (Brent Staples, NY Times Book Review)

GENERAL :
    -ESSAY : Ex-Conservatives & Other Silly Folk : An over-hyped, overdone story. (Jonah Goldberg, National Review)
    -ESSAY : The Ex-Cons Right-Wing Thinkers Go Left! (Corey Robin, Lingua Franca)

Quitting the Nairobi Trio (2000) (Jim Knipfel)

    Pure Imagination

    Come with me and you'll be
    In a world of pure imagination
    Take a look and you'll see
    Into your imagination

    We'll begin with a spin
    Trav'ling in the world of my creation
    What we'll see will defy
    Explanation

    If you want to view paradise
    Simply look around and view it
    Anything you want to, do it
    Want to change the world, there's nothing to it

    There is no life I know
    To compare with pure imagination
    Living there, you'll be free
    If you truly wish to be

    If you want to view paradise
    Simply look around and view it
    Anything you want to, do it
    Want to change the world, there's nothing to it

    There is no life I know
    To compare with pure imagination
    Living there, you'll be free
    If you truly wish to be

        -Anthony Newley (1931-1999), Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971)

Here's exhibit A in the case for not judging a book by its cover, or, for that matter, its title.  I first saw the book in a discount bin, spine out, and wondered how come I'd never heard of the Nairobi Trio.  Intrigued enough to at least check it out, I was greeted by one of the most frightening images I've ever seen on a book jacket : a derby wearing, cigar smoking, guy in a gorilla mask, the whole thing tinted blue.  Check out the author info on the back flap and there's a picture of a long-haired guy in a top hat who looks like a cross between Stevie Ray Vaughn and the actor David Warner.  The book is eminently putdownable.

But then I read a couple decent reviews and realized that the author is a columnist for the consistently diverting NY Press, so I figured it was worth a shot.  Well, from the opening pages, where he analyzes Gene Wilder singing Pure Imagination as an endorsement of a schizophrenic world view, Jim Knipfel's memoir of a six month stay in a Minneapolis psych ward is at least wryly amusing, and often laugh out loud funny.

Particularly funny, though it obviously should not be, is his account of how he ended up there, following a series of attempts to kill himself.  In order to save his family the pain of dealing with his action, Knipfel, who at the time was a graduate student and teaching assistant in philosophy at the University of Minnesota, decided to try framing a student who'd been sending him love notes.  In order to make it look like she had stalked and killed him, he tried slashing his back with a steak knife, with predictably feeble results.  Then, having experimented previously with self-asphyxiation, he decided to hang himself, but found the experience much less pleasurable this time.  So finally, he tried sleeping pills and whiskey, but somehow managed to stumble out into the hallway of his apartment building, but not before seriously damaging his liver.

Taken to the hospital, he awoke screaming quotations from Nietzsche in rhymed German, and was diagnosed as suffering a "mixed-personality disorder."  He was thought to have undergone some kind of "psychotic break" and was placed in a locked psychiatric ward to determine if he posed a further danger to himself or the general public.  But he was not really given any therapy, nor treatments, his stay basically consisted of sitting around the ward, reading the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, and then a ten minute session with a doctor once a week.  Even these brief visits though seem to have been less about providing care than simply assessing his condition.  Finally, with no warning and no apparent change in his mental status, Knipfel was moved to an open ward and then released, mostly because he reached the maximum stay allowed by state law.

It would be easy enough for Knipfel to rail against the complete inadequacy of the care he received, and he'd be justified, but that's not what he's after here, mercifully.  Instead he offers a rather calm and dispassionate account of his experience, of the folks he met, and of the process by which he decided he didn't want to kill himself anymore.  This last is where the "Nairobi Trio" comes in.  I'll not ruin it for prospective readers; suffice it to say that they were characters who dressed up as gorillas for a musical act in an old Ernie Kovacs skit, whose nearly Sisyphiphean plight Knipfel came to identify with.

This is a minor but worthwhile book, less concerned with milking mental illness for sympathy or drama than with telling an interesting story and telling it with great humor.  Knipfel uses an interesting technique in that he never actually tells the reader whether he thinks he was insane during this period of time, but all of the folks around him react to him in ways that suggest he was.  Unfortunately, the one part of the story that does not work well is his extended recreation of various hallucinations he endured.  These are fairly tedious.  But I suppose if they made sense to us then we'd be in trouble, which maybe provides the answer to the sanity question.

GRADE : B+

Buy Quitting the Nairobi Trio at Amazon.com

WEBSITES :
    -Slackjaw Online is a selection of columns written by Jim Knipfel
    -EXCERPT : Chapter One :  Where I Am? from Quitting the Nairobi Trio
    -INTERVIEW : Q&A With Werner Herzog (Godfrey Cheshire & Jim Knipfel, NY Press)
    -ESSAY : Dealing (Jim Knipfel, September 2001, NY Press)
    -ESSAY : Why a Blind Man Has So Many Books (Jim Knipfel, Rare Book Room)
    -ESSAY : This is the Drowning of the Age of Aquarius (Jim Knipfel, Hootenanny)
    -ESSAY : Paying Off Some Karmic Debt (e-Slackjaw Jim Knipfel, NY Press)
    -ESSAY : Cheap Haircuts (e-Slackjaw Jim Knipfel, NY Press)
    -ESSAY : Tuneless Spectacles (e-Slackjaw Jim Knipfel, NY Press)
    -INTERVIEW : Kicking and Scribing All the Way to the "Other Side of Sight" : The Planet Arrington E-nterview with NY PRESS Columnist,  Author, and Retinitis Pigmentosa Sufferer  Jim Knipfel (Michael Arrington)
    -INTERVIEW : On the Psych Ward: an interview with Jim Knipfel (Big News, July 2000)
    -INTERVIEW : Jim Knipfel: The DairyAire Interview By Karrie Adamany and Jeff Johnson
    -PROFILE : Deviltry and Segars: At Home in Jim Knipfel's Head (November 1999, Rare Book Room)
    -PROFILE : The Mayor of Hostile City : Misanthropic columnist Jim Knipfel is a successful author with fans from Thomas Pynchon to Morley Safer. Is it Philadelphia's fault? (Sam Adams, June 2000, Philadelphia City Paper)
    -PROFILE : On the Chin : In Slackjaw, Jim Knipfel faces life's tragedies head on. (Joy Malinowski, February 11-18, 1999, Philadelphia City Paper)
    -ESSAY : How to get a blurb from Thomas Pynchon : Start by sending him your novel -- it can't hurt (Craig Offman , Salon)
    -ESSAY : Vanity Press Musings (Mugger, Jewish World Review)
    -REVIEW : of Quitting the Nairobi Trio (Daphne Merkin, NY Times Book Review)
    -REVIEW : of Quitting the Nairobi Trio (Rick Levin, The Stranger)
    -REVIEW : of Quitting the Nairobi Trio (AMANDA EYRE WARD, Austin Chronicle)
    -REVIEW : of Quitting the Nairobi Trio (Malcolm Jones, Newsweek)
    -REVIEW : of Quitting the Nairobi Trio (Heather Lee Schroeder, Capital Times, Madison WI)
    -REVIEW : of Quitting the Nairobi Trio (Jonathan Shipley, Book Browser)
    -REVIEW : of Slackjaw (Michiko Kakutani, NY Times)
    -REVIEW : of Slackjaw (PAULA FRIEDMAN, NY Times Book Review)
    -REVIEW : of Slackjaw (DOUGLAS WOLK, Village Voice)
    -REVIEW : of Slackjaw (Leonard Gill, Memphis Flyer)
    -REVIEW : of Slackjaw (Charlie Dickinson, Savoy on Books)
    -REVIEW : of Slackjaw (Peggy Hailey, Stomp of Approval)
    -REVIEW : of Slackjaw ( Jonathan Shipley, Book Browser)
    -REVIEW : of Slackjaw (Weekly Wire)
    -REVIEW : of Slackjaw (Jason Michael Ruiz, umn.edu Daily)
    -REVIEW : of Slackjaw (JULIET WATERS, Montreal Mirror)
    -REVIEW : of Slackjaw (Caroline Kettlewell, The Wag)
    -REVIEW : of Slackjaw (ADAM HEIMLICH, The Stranger)
    -REVIEW : of Slackjaw (Brendan Bernhard, LA Weekly)
    -BOOK LIST : 1 0   B E S T  N O N F I C T I O N : 1999 (C l a r i s s a  C r u z, Entertainment Weekly)

    If you never commit yourself, you never express yourself, and yourself becomes less and less
    significant and decisive.  Calculating selfishness is the annihilation of self.
        -Madeleine L'Engle, Two-Part Invention, quoting Chekov?

Madeleine L'Engle, author of the beloved Newberry Award winner A Wrinkle in Time (see Orrin's review) here tells the genuinely moving story of her forty year marriage to the actor Hugh Franklin, an early star of All My Children, and of his agonizing death from cancer.  The book is at its very best describing the commitment that marriage requires of people, the commitment to one another which makes so vital an institution.  At one point she asks :

    [I]f Hugh dies first, would I ever be able to stop saying 'we' and say 'I'?  I doubt it.  I do not think
    that death can take away the fact that Hugh and I are 'we' and 'us,' a new creature born at the time
    of our marriage vows, which has grown along with us as our marriage has grown.  Even during the
    times, inevitable in all marriages, when I have felt angry, or alienated, the instinctive 'we' remains.

This kind of selfless devotion to another and to a relationship is so rare and precious in our ever more atomized culture, that to see two people who realize it so fully is really edifying.

Oddly enough, though it is probably one of the things she is best known for, I found her religious musings less effective.  Her God is entirely too much a personal God, as she seeks to justify his ways to herself.  Likewise, her comparisons of Hugh to Christ, and of his cancer to the crucifixion, seemed a little over the top to me.

Lastly, though Ms L'Engle seems like a perfectly decent woman, perhaps even an unusually decent one, her intermittent forays into political questions are disturbingly misguided.  As she tells about a trip to China during which the United States bombed Libya and she felt compelled to apologize to people she met in the street, the reader can hardly suppress a desire to see someone dope slap her.  She is after all speaking to people who live under Communist oppression, apologizing for a democracy's measured response to the provocations of another totalitarian dictatorship.

But let's set these objections aside for now, and just consider the book as a portrait of a loving marriage and of the maintenance that even a love-filled marriage requires.  Here it succeeds and is so successful that one wishes all young married couples, or prospective couples, would read it.  She does not try to sugarcoat her life or her marriage; she presents them with all their rough spots intact.  The message that comes shining through is that the life has been infinitely better because of the marriage and because that life was shared with Hugh.  In one of my favorite passages she acknowledges :

    We were not a latter-day Heloise and Abelard, Pelleas and Melisande when we married.  For one
    thing, the Heloises and Abelards, the Pelleases and Melisandes, do not get married and stay married
    for forty years.  A love which depends solely on romance, on the combustion of two attracting
    chemistries, tends to fizzle out.  The famous lovers usually end up dead.  A long term marriage has
    to move beyond chemistry to compatibility, to friendship, to companionship.  It is certainly not that
    passion disappears, but that it is conjoined with other ways of love.

Of course, the culture tends to glorify the passionate whirlwind romance, rather than the steady committed marriage.  Anyone fortunate enough to share in the latter, to enjoy true love, realizes how empty is the former.

GRADE : C+

Buy Two-Part Invention at Amazon.com

Recommended books by Madeleine L'Engle :
    -A Wrinkle in Time (1962)  (read Orrin's review, Grade: A+)
    -Two-Part Invention : The Story of a Marriage (1988)   (read Orrin's review, Grade: C+)

WEBSITES :
    -ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA : Your search: madeleine l'engle
    -ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA : L'Engle, Madeleine
    -REVIEW : of CHRISTMAS The King James Version. Illustrated by Jan Pienkowski  (Madeleine L'Engle, NY Times Book Review)
    -REVIEW : of WRITERS REVEALED By Rosemary Hartill (Madeleine L'Engle, NY Times Book Review)
    -INTERVIEW : A New Wrinkle: A Conversation with Madeleine L'Engle (Amazon.com)
    -INTERVIEW : A Conversation With Madeleine L'Engle (Heather Webb, Mars Hill Review Winter/Spring 1996)
    -INTERVIEW : Listening to the Story (Other Side)
    -INTERVIEW : Faith During Adversity (Frugal Fun)
    -PROFILE : A Wrinkle in Faith : The unique spiritual pilgrimage of Madeleine L'Engle (Donald Hettinga, Books & Culture)
    -PROFILE : Prolific Author Weaves Spirituality Through Her Storytelling (CATHERINE SARAULT, NY Times, January 27, 1991)
    -PROFILE : Into the Depths of the Human Heart : Madeleine L'Engle's search for God (Suzanne St. Yves, Sojourners)
    -Madeleine L'Engle Collection (Wheaton College)
    -Madeleine L'Engle Teacher Resource File
    -Bonastra -- The Madeleine L'Engle WWW Resource
    -The Madeleine L'Engle Fan Homepage
    -The Tesseract: A Madeleine L'Engle Bibliography in 5 Dimensions
    -The Margaret A. Edwards Award--the L'Engle site
    -"Flying Dreams" Linda's Madeleine L'Engle Page
    -BOOK DISCSUSSION QUESTIONS : Madeleine L'Engle Two-Part Invention: The Story of a Marriage
    -ARCHIVES : l'engle (Find Articles)
    -ARCHIVES : l'engle (Mag Portal)
    -REVIEW : of TWO-PART INVENTION The Story of a Marriage. By Madeleine L'Engle (Dan Wakefield, NY TImes Book Review)
    -REVIEW : of MANY WATERS By Madeleine L'Engle (Susan Cooper, NY Times Book Review)

GENERAL :
    -ESSAY :  Theological Themes in Science Fiction (Anitra L. Freeman)

My Love Affair With America : The Cautionary Tale of a Cheerful Conservative (2000) (Norman Podhoretz Ý1930-)

    Perhaps the absolutely fundamental neoconservative idea was the need to reassert American
    nationalism or patriotism or "Americanism" or "American exceptionalism": the idea that American
    society, however flawed, is not only essentially good but somehow morally superior to other
    societies.

    [This idea] is especially associated with immigration.  The future neoconservatives mostly came
    from relatively recent immigrant stock.  It is arguable, though certainly unproven, that such people
    in America feel a stronger need  than those of longer American lineage to display their credentials
    as Americans; or rather, that those whose families came over on the Mayflower feel that there is
    nothing incompatible between deep patriotism and a propensity to shout about what needs to be
    changed.
            -The World Turned Right Side Up : A History of the Conservative Ascendancy in America (1996)  (Godfrey Hodgson)
 

Boy, Godfrey Hodgson really hits the nail on the head there.  Norman Podhoretz's book, My Love Affair With America, is basically a protracted attempt to suggest that he loves America more than any of his former rivals on the Left, or current rivals on the Right.  Podhoretz famously broke ranks with the intellectual New York set in the 1970's, having determined that their anti-Americanism, most ostentatiously displayed during the Vietnam War, neither jibed with his own life experiences--the meteoric rise of a poor Jewish child of immigrants to respected writer status--nor was compatible with the need to maintain a militarily strong and assertive America, to stand as a final guarantor of an embattled Israel's continued existence.  He has an easy time rewinning his old battle with the radical counterculture (though he's unable to resist the compulsion to claim credit for having created that counterculture in the first place).  Their anti-Americanism is a result of their genuine opposition to freedom, which is America's organizing principle.  They do not wish to perfect America, but to destroy it and remake it in an image of their utopian (or dystopian) fantasies.  Podhoretz gives them yet another well-deserved drubbing.

But then he takes on the modern Right, and here he founders badly :

    In the mid-1990s there unexpectedly came an outburst of anti-Americanism even among some of
    the very conservatives I thought had been permanently immunized against itÖI was already pushing
    seventy, and it made me a little tired to think of going back into combat over a phenomenon that I
    had fondly imagined I would never have to deal with again, and certainly not on the Right

The anti-Americanism he's talking about is the harsh, but loving, cultural criticism of Bill Bennett and Robert Bork, and the tentative suggestions on the Religious Right that the Supreme Court may have so far departed from the Constitution in its decisions on social issues, specifically abortion and Church/State issues, that it is no longer a legitimate institution.  Podhoretz is horrified by these trends and seeks to read them out of the Conservative movement, but they were there long before him and will remain long after.

The problem for Podhoretz, and for neoconservatism in general, is the absence of a core political philosophy.  The Left believes that the central duty of government is to guarantee equality of outcomes among the citizenry and that government is capable of solving social problems and effectively running the economy.  Classic Conservatism is structured around a countervailing belief in freedom, which necessitates a very limited government, but strong social institutions, and, though it requires equality of opportunity, accepts that the resulting outcomes will be very different.  Neoconservatism is really only interested in supporting Israel and opposing quotas, it's largely agnostic on the other issues and has no firm view of the proper role of government generally.  On social issues, a natural distrust of Christian conservatism and the fact that neoconservatism arose in the urban milieu, combine to create a willingness to countenance big government, and the need for a massive military requires big government. On the other hand, if equality is enforced by the state, it will work to the detriment of groups, like Jews, who are disproportionately successful, so there's a reluctance to trust government too far.  This naked self-interest is certainly legitimate, but it's hardly a coherent political philosophy.

That Podhoretz is only marginally conservative becomes clear from the fact that he almost completely ignores the question of the size and role of government, from his dismissal of objections to the 1964 Civil Rights Act, from his failure to discuss, except in passing, the free market economic philosophy of folks like Milton Friedman and F. A. Hayek, and from his failure to comprehend why abortion is such a salient issue on the Right.  Even more revealing is his thinly disguised contempt for the conservative intellectuals of the first half of the century, who either go unmentioned (Albert Jay Nock, for example) or are dismissed as cranks (like the Agrarians--Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, etc.).   He seems to think that conservatism was born in the 1950s, only became a significant political movement in the post Vietnam era (not coincidentally, just after he joined it) and consists of little more than nationalism.

Were that true, were conservatism nothing more than a blind patriotism, of recent vintage, then he would be right to criticize cultural conservatives for questioning the moral climate of the country and the direction in which it is heading.  But conservatism, even American conservatism, antedates America.  And conservatism has endured precisely because it offers such a powerful critique of America.  In Albert Jay Nock's great book, Memoirs of a Superfluous Man, he says the following :

    Burke touches [the] matter of patriotism with a searching phrase.  'For us to love our country,' he
    said, 'our country ought to be lovely.'  I have sometimes thought that here may be the rock on
    which Western civilization will finally shatter itself.  Economism can build a society which is rich,
    prosperous, powerful, even one which has a reasonably wide diffusion of material well-being.  It
    can not build one which is lovely, one which has savour and depth, and which exercises the
    irresistible attraction that loveliness wields.  Perhaps by the time economism has run its course the
    society it has built may be tired of itself, bored by its own hideousness, and may despairingly
    consent to annihilation, aware that it is too ugly to be let live any longer.

By economism, Nock means a kind of unfettered materialism or consumerism.  These lines, prophetic anyway, seem even more prescient in light of the events of September 11th.  There is a palpable sense in America's continuing discussion of the events that the America that died on September 11th deserved to die (though the victims certainly did not), that it was too self-centered, too trivial, too degenerate.  People have now judged the America of the 1990s, which Podhoretz is here defending against conservative critics, and, as W. H. Auden said of an earlier time, they have determined it to be "a low dishonest decade."

In the final pages of the book Podhoretz offers a dayyenu, a list of each of the things that would have been sufficient for us to owe America a debt of gratitude.  After a brief, and platitudinous, generic list, including such things as "domestic tranquillity" (which one is tempted to point out that China too enjoys), he gets to his real reasons for feeling patriotic, and they are all about the success he's made of himself : "...America...sent me to a great university..."; "...America handed me a magazine of my own to run..."; "...America saw to it that I would live in an apartment in Manhattan...";  "...America arranged for me to build a country house...".  It's utterly vacuous and truly appalling.

Freedom is vital to everything that America stands for.  It makes possible the kind of rags to riches story that Podhoretz has lived.  But it is not enough.  Conservatives demand freedom, but also believe that our country "ought to be lovely."  This loveliness consists mostly of an adherence to the eternal values of the Judeo-Christian tradition, of which, as Nock says, we are unworthy inheritors.  And right there is another key element, humility.  Conservatives realize that our inheritance is too precious to experiment with willy-nilly and so seek to conserve as much as can possibly be conserved of that tradition.  Paraphrasing Nock (one last time, I promise), who borrowed a phrase from Lord Falkland :

    What it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change.

It is this very basic premise of conservatism--that it actually seeks to conserve something--that Podhoretz seemingly can not comprehend.  More's the pity.

GRADE : C

Buy My Love Affair With America at Amazon.com

WEBSITES :
    -Norman Podhoretz : Senior Fellow (Hudson Institute)
    -Commentary Magazine
    -Partisan Review
    -Featured Author: Norman Podhoretz : With News and Reviews From the  Archives of The New York Times
    -BOOKNOTES : Author: Norman Podhoretz Title: Ex-Friends: Falling Out With Allen Ginsberg, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Lillian Hellman, Hannah Arendt and Norman Mailer Air Date: March 28, 1999 (C-SPAN)
    -AUDIO : Breaking Ranks by Norman Podhoretz (YAF)
    -AUDIO : The Bloody Crossroads by Norman Podhoretz (YAF)
    -EXCERPT : First Chapter of My Love Affair With America : The  Cautionary Tale of a Cheerful Conservative
    -EXCERPT : First Chapter of Ex-Friends Falling Out With Allen Ginsberg, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Lillian  Hellman, Hannah Arendt, and Norman Mailer
    -EXCERPT : How to Lose Influential Friends, from 'Ex-Friends'
    -ESSAY : Syria Yes, Israel No! : Our anti-terror coalition doesn't distinguish friend from foe (Norman Podhoretz, November 3, 2001, Weekly Standard)
    -ESSAY : Israel Isn't the Issue Islamic fanatics hate America in its own right. (NORMAN PODHORETZ, September 20, 2001, Wall Street Journal)
    -ESSAY : America the Beautiful (Norman Podhoretz, Winter 2001, City  Journal)
    -ESSAY : Patriotism and Its Enemies (Norman Podhoretz, July 3, 2000, Wall Street Journal)
     -ESSAY : Was Bach Jewish? : In his strict adherence to the musical  laws of his time, Johann Sebastian Bach was quintessentially Jewish.  (Norman Podhoretz, December 1999, Prospect)
    -ESSAY : Learning from Isaiah. (Norman Podhoretz, 05/01/00,  Commentary)
    -ESSAY : Buchanan and Anti-Semitism (Norman Podhoretz, Wall Street  Journal | October 25, 1999)
    -ESSAY : What Happened to Ralph Ellison.(Norman Podhoretz, July 1999,  Commentary)
    -ESSAY : Life of His Party : How Bill Clinton saved the Democrats.  (Norman Podhoretz, September 1999, National Review)
    -ESSAY : HAS ISRAEL LOST ITS NERVE? (Norman Podhoretz, Wall Street  Journal-Op-Ed September 10, 1999)
    -ESSAY : The adventure of Philip Roth.(Commentary Magazine, April 07 2000 by Norman Podhoretz)
    -ESSAY : The "Loyalty Trap": Glenn Loury, once a neoconservative  luminary, reverses course. (Norman Podhoretz, Jan 25, 1999, National Review)
    -ESSAY : Heroism in a Politically Correct Age (Norman Podhoretz, January 1998, National Review)
    -ESSAY : My war with Allen Ginsberg. (08/01/97, Commentary)
    -ESSAY : Allen Ginsberg's Secret : What he did with Norman Podhoretz  at Columbia. (Paul Berman, June 4, 1997, Slate)
    -ESSAY : Military Intervention in Central America?  (Norman Podhoretz, July 24, 1983, NY Times)
    -ESSAY : The Cold War Again?  (Norman Podhoretz,  June 11, 1978, NY Times)
    -ESSAY : Now, Instant Zionism (Norman Podhoretz, February 3, 1974, NY Times)
    -ESSAY : New Names on the Dust Jackets (Norman Podhoretz, June 15, 1958, NY Times)
    -LECTURE : Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness (Norman Podhoretz, October 12, 2000, The Manhattan Institute for Policy Research : The 2000 Wriston Lecture)
    -DISCUSSION : ìTwo Faces of Realityî (Robert Jastrow and Norman Podhoretz, George C. Marshall Institute Roundtable discussion December 12, 2000)
    -ARCHIVES : Norman Podhoretz (NY Review of Books)
    -INTERVIEW : with Norman Podhoretz (Conversations with History: Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley)
    -ARCHIVES : Norman Podhoretz (Think Tank, PBS)
    -ARTICLE : Podhoretz on 25 Years at Commentary (Walter Goodman, January 31, 1985, NY Times)
    -ARTICLE : Critic of the Left Ready to Step Aside (DEIRDRE CARMODY, January 19, 1995, NY Times)
    -PROFILE : Norman's Conquest: A Commentary on the Podhoretz Legacy (Mark Gerson, Fall 1995, Policy Review)
    -ESSAY : Right Is Still Right (The Conformist [Scott McConnell], NY Press)
    -ESSAY : Poison-pen Pals (Joseph Epstein, March 1999, Commentary)
    -ESSAY : NORMAN'S NARCISSISM: PODHORETZ IN LOVE (Justin Raimondo, October 16, 2000, Anti-War)
    -ESSAY : "Response to Norman Podhoretz," (Peter W. Rodman, Commentary,  January 2000)
    -DIALOGUE : When Is It OK To Betray a Friend? (Michael Sandel and Christopher Buckley, March 11, 1999, Slate)
    -ESSAY : George Orwell and the Big Cannibal Critics. (Jonah Raskin. Monthly Review, May 1983)
    -ESSAY : THE PUNCH LINES : Feuding Writers Get Nasty (SUSAN SHAPIRO, Voice Literary Supplement)
    -ESSAY : BUCHANAN VERSUS PODHORETZ: WHO IS THE REAL HATER? (Justin
Raimondo, AntiWar, October 27, 1999)
    -ESSAY : Breaking up with the Beats : Kerouac and company were my first literary loves -- but I had to get off their road. (David Gates, April 12, 1999, Salon)
    -Norman Podhoretz (1930- )(American Literature on the Web)
    -Neoconservatism Online
    -ARCHIVES : "norman podhoretz" (Find Articles)
    -ARCHIVES : "norman podhoretz" (Mag Portal)
    -REVIEW : of My Love Affair (Joseph Dorman, NY Times Book Review)
    -REVIEW : of My Love Affair (Seth Lipsky, National Review)
    -REVIEW : of My Love Affair (William F. Buckley, Jr.)
    -REVIEW: of My Love Affair With America by Norman Podhoretz Yankee Doodle Dandy   Celebrating America While Breaking Ranks and Settling Scores  (JIM SLEEPER, LA Times)
    -REVIEW : of My Love Affair (Ronald Radosh, Front Page)
    -RESPONSE : Row Over Radosh (Jim Sleeper, Front Page)
    -REVIEW : of My Love Affair (James R. Whelan, Human Events)
    -REVIEW : of My Love Affair (Thomas Sowell)
    -REVIEW : of My Love Affair (AntiWar)
    -REVIEW : of My Love Affair (Myles Kantor, Lew Rockwell.com)
    -REVIEW : of My Love Affair (BERNARD BASKIN, Canadian Jewish News)
    -REVIEW : of My Love Affair (Balint Vazsonyi, American Outlook)
    -REVIEW : of My Love Affair (David Mutch, CS Monitor)
    -REVIEW : of My Love Affair (Ellen Willis, dissent)
    -REVIEW : of My Love Affair (Rick Richman, Jewish Journal of Los Angeles)
    -REVIEW : of My Love Affair (Arch T. Allen, Metro NC)
    -REVIEW : of 'Doings and Undoings' (1964) (David Daiches, NY TImes)
    -REVIEW : of 'Making It' (1968)(Frederic Raphael, NY Times)
    -REVIEW : of 'Breaking Ranks' (1979)(Joseph Epstein, NY Times Book Review)
    -REVIEW : of 'The Present Danger' (1980)(Anatole Broyard, NY Times)
    -REVIEW : of 'Why We Were in Vietnam' (1982)(James Fallows, NY Times Book Review)
    -REVIEW : of Why We Were in Vietnam (Conservative Perspectives on Vietnam)
    -REVIEW : of The Bloody Crossroads (Cynthia Ozick, NY Times Book Review)
    -REVIEW : of Ex-Friends (Christopher Lehmann-Haupt)
    -REVIEW : of 'Ex-Friends: Falling Out With Allen Ginsberg, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Lillian Hellman, Hannah Arendt, and Norman Mailer' (1999) (Richard Brookhiser, NY Times Book Review)
    -REVIEW : of Ex-Friends (William F. Buckley, Jr., Sacramento Bee)
    -REVIEW : of Ex-Friends (Carl Rollyson, New Criterion)
    -REVIEW : of Ex-Friends and Making It, by Norman Podhoretz  (Christopher Hitchens, Harper's)
    -REVIEW : of Ex-Friends (Arnold Beichman, Policy Review)
    -REVIEW : of Ex-Friends (Jeffrey Hart, National Review)
    -REVIEW : of Ex-Friends (Nicholas Lemann, Washington Monthly)
    -REVIEW : of Ex-Friends : Podhoretz: the man who killed his father--twice (Robert Fulford, Globe and Mail)
    -REVIEW : of Ex-Friends (PETER WORTHINGTON -- Toronto Sun)
    -REVIEW : of Ex-Friends (A.O. Scott, Lingua Franca)
    -REVIEW : of Ex-Friends (Culture Vulture)
    -REVIEW : of Ex-Friends (ROGER BISHOP, Book Page)
    -REVIEW : of Ex-Friends (Mona Charen)
    -REVIEW : of Ex-Friends (Jordan Hoffman, Leisure Suit)
    -REVIEW : of Ex-Friends (WALTER KIRN, New York)
    -REVIEW : of Ex-Friends (JOHN LEONARD, The Nation)
    -REVIEW : of Ex-Friends (Nathan Abrams, Faculty of Continuing Education, Birkbeck College, University of London .Published by H-Ideas)
    -REVIEW : of Jewish American Literature: A Norton Anthology Edited by Jules Chametzky, John Felstiner, Hilene Flanzbaum, and Kathryn Hellerstein (Ruth R. Wisse, New Republic)
    -REVIEW : of Partisans: Marriage, Politics, and Betrayal Among the New York Intellectuals, by David Laskin (Kanchan Limaye, National Review)

JOHN PODHORETZ :
    -ARCHIVES : John Podhoretz, National Review
    -ESSAY : A RECKONING FOR THE NOISEMAKERS (John Podhoretz, 9/13/01, NY
Post)
    -ESSAY : Jeers to You, Mrs. Robinson : Whoís the weakest link now? (John Podhoretz, June 9-10, 2001, National Review)
    -REVIEW : of How We Got Here: The 70ís: The Decade That Brought You Modern Life (For Better or Worse), by David Frum (John Podhoretz, National Review)
    -REVIEW : of A. I. : Brave New Idiocy : A.I. morphs into a clinical depiction of the Oedipus complex. (John Podhoretz, National Review)
    -REVIEW : of Atlantis : Disneyís New Ride : How Disney lost its magic. (John Podhoretz, National Review)
    -REVIEW : Ladies Who Punch : Reviewing Tomb Raider (John Podhoretz, National Review)
    -REVIEW : of The Animal : The Animal Attraction : Bursting the bubble of cultural correctness (John Podhoretz, National Review)
    -PROFILE : Oedipus & Podhoretz : His father fought Stalinists. But for Post edit-page chief John Podhoretz, sitcoms are the battleground of freedom. (HANNA ROSIN, New York)
    -ESSAY : Poor taste pundits  : The outbursts against the Kennedy family last week by Rush Limbaugh and John Podhoretz were a disgrace to the conservative movement. (Joe Conason, July 27, 1999, Salon)
    -ESSAY : Media Circus: Doing the right-wing shuffle : John Podhoretz and other right-wing journalists are the playthings of the big-money conservatives who bankroll newspapers and magazines in order to further their political agendas (Eric Alterman, Salon)

MIDGE DECTER :
    -REVIEW : of Hooking Up by Tom Wolfe (Commentary Magazine,  Midge Decter)
    -ARCHIVES : "midge decter" (Find Articles)
    -REVIEW : of AN OLD WIFE'S TALE My Seven Decades in Love and War. By Midge Decter (Dorothy Gallagher, NY Times Book Review)
    -REVIEW : of An Old Wife's Tale by Midge Decter Ý(Commentary Magazine,  David Gelernter)
    -REVIEW : of An Old Wife's Tale by Midge Decter (Tish Durkin, Atlantic Monthly)
    -REVIEW : of An Old Wife's Tale (Bella Stander, Washington Post)

NEOCONSERVATISM :
    -Neoconservatism Online
    -The American Enterprise
    -City Journal
    -Front Page
    -Jewish World Review
    -The National Interest
    -The Public Interest
    -The Weekly Standard
    -Arguing the World (PBS)
    -American Enterprise Institute
    -Center for the Study of the Popular Culture
    -Empower America
    -Ethics and Public Policy Center
    -Hudson Institute
    -Manhattan Institute
    -ESSAY : The Voice of Neoconservatism : "We in America fought a culture war, and we lost" (Ronald Bailey, Reason, October 2001)
    -ESSAY : Against the Neo-Conservative Empire (Derek Copold, Texas Mercury, October 2001)
    -ESSAY : All in the Family : the Kristol Clan's Neocon Dynasty (David Greenburg, FEED)
    -ESSAY : Who Won the Cold War? (Jacob Heilbrunn, October 1996, American Prospect)
    -ESSAY : Great Escape : HOW BILL KRISTOL DITCHED CONSERVATISM  (Franklin Foer, May 2001, New Republic)
    -ESSAY : Arguing the GOP : The neocons wake up. (FRANKLIN FOER, 03.20.00, New Republic)
    -ESSAY : Stop, Thief! (Eric Alterman, October 2000, The Nation)
    -ESSAY : Neo-Con Invasion (Samuel Francis, The New American : John Birch Society)
    -ESSAY : The Connection Man : The mourners at the funeral of New York Post editorial-page editor Eric Breindel ran the gamut from Bobby Kennedy Jr. to David Dinkins to Rudy Giuliani to Rupert Murdoch to Norman Podhoretz. How did a right-wing ideologue (with a heroin bust on his résumé) become the power elite's favorite journalist?  (CRAIG HOROWITZ, New York)
    -ESSAY : There's more to a conservative than meets the eye (Michael Taube, Calgary Herald [Alberta, Canada], August 26, 2000)
    -ESSAY : Those Savvy Neo-Cons: Hardly Conservative (Carlo DiNota, Chalcedon Report)
    -ESSAY : The Ex-Cons : Right-Wing Thinkers Go Left! (Corey Robin, February 2001, Lingua Franca)
    -ARCHIVES : neoconservatism (Find Articles)
    -ARCHIVES : neoconservatism (Mag Portal)
    -REVIEW : of The Neoconservative Mind: Politics, Culture, and the War of Ideology. By Gary Dorrien (Mark Gerson, First Things)

GENERAL :
    -Freeman Center for Strategic Studies : attempts to aid Israel in her quest to survive in a hostile world, commissions extensive research into the military and strategic issues related to the Arab-Israeli
conflict and disseminates pertinent information to the Jewish community and worldwide
    -ARCHIVES : Religious Liberty & the Courts (First Things)
    -SYMPOSIUM : The End of Democracy? The Judicial Usurpation of Politics (First Things)
    -ESSAY : Judges Delayed, Justice Denied : The Right Wing Attack on the Independent Judiciary (People for the American Way)
    -ESSAY : Uncivil disobedience : Has the religious right taken leave of America ó or just its senses? (DAVID FUTRELLE, November 1996, Salon)
    -LECTURE : Whither the Old Conservatism? (An Accuracy in Academia Address by Paul Gottfried, Delivered at AIAís 1999 Conservative University at Georgetown University)
    -ESSAY : Fall Guys : GUESS WHO HATES AMERICA? CONSERVATIVES. (Lawrence F. Kaplan, 06.15.00, New Republic)
    -ESSAY : LEFT AND RIGHT : Big Government's Proper Calling (Noemie Emery, October 14 2001, LA Times)
    -REVIEW : of Between Friends: The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and  Mary McCarthy 1949-1975 (R.Z. SHEPPARD, TIME)
    -REVIEW : of Cultural Conservatism, Political Liberalism: From  Criticism to Cultural Studies
James Seaton (Henry Gonshak, MT Tech.-University of Montana)

Fortunate Son: The Healing of a Vietnam Vet (1991)(Lewis B. Puller, Jr.  1945-1994)

Lew Puller was the son of Chesty Puller, the most decorated soldier in the history of the U.S. Marine Corps.  His legendary father fought in five wars and rose from private to three star general before health problems cut short his career.  With him as a role model, it was perhaps inevitable that when the time came, Lew would enthusiastically head to Vietnam.  This Pulitzer Prize winning autobiography tells the story of Lew Puller's relationship with his father, his own service in Vietnam and of his heroic attempt to rebuild his body and spirit after being dismembered by a booby-trapped howitzer round.  He lost his legs and his hands were badly mangled, but he managed to hold together his marriage, help raise a son, earn a law degree and run for Congress.

Then, in the wake of losing the election, his always problematic drinking escalated to the point of genuine alcoholism and he attempted suicide.  He went through rehab and became involved in things like the Vietnam War Memorial project, which helped him deal with his ambivalence about the war; ambivalence which he expresses best in discussing why he did not join other vets in throwing his medals over the White House fence:

    As I sat silently in the dimly lit closet feeling the weight of the bronze and silver in my hand and
    studying the red, white and blue stripes of my Silver Star and the majestic cameo of George
    Washington on my Purple Hearts, I knew that I could never part with them.  They had cost me too
    dearly, and though I now saw clearly that the war in which they had been earned was a wasted
    cause, the medals still represented the dignity and the caliber of my service and of those with whom
    I had served. I could no more discard them than I could repudiate my country, my Marine Corps or
    my fellow veterans. As I put them away, I was very sad and very tired but grateful nonetheless that
    my children were asleep in their beds in America rather than anywhere else in the world.

This thoughtfulness and undiminished patriotism inform the book and his heroic battle against injury, alcohol and depression provide for a genuinely moving human drama.

But the book has a really tragic coda, because in 1994, Lew Puller killed himself.  There is a sort of a cottage industry in Vietnam War myth making.  We've all heard about, or seen in movies, the alarming number of Vets who went nuts (remember when Post Traumatic Stress Disorder was still just called Vietnam Vet Syndrome).  Anecdotal evidence suggests that they had vastly elevated suicide rates.  And then there is all the bilge about how the troops were disproportionately poor and minority, about the effects they suffered from Agent Orange, and so on.  All of these are either complete canards or wild exaggerations, but they live on because both Veterans groups and opponents of the War have a vested political interest in perpetuating them.

It seems to me that it would be a real shame to remember Lew Puller as simply another casualty of the War.  The devastating wounds, physical and psychic, that he received in Vietnam may well have been the proximate cause of his death, but as I think this excellent memoir amply demonstrates, his feelings of inadequacy were as much a function of measuring himself against a mythic father as they were a result of a horrible injury.  His testimony of his own life and service to his country is too important a contribution to our understanding of the cultural and familial forces that send young men to war for us to reduce that life to a simple equation:  Gung Ho soldier + War - legs and hands = suicidal drunk.  We should instead take seriously his choice of titles; Fortunate Son reflects his understanding that--while war and handicap and alcohol all play their part in the tale--his story is fundamentally about a son trying to prove himself to a father and on some level reflects his belief that he had done so.

GRADE: B+

WEBSITES:
    -ARTICLE: Area's 'fortunate son' dies (Rappahannock Record Thursday, May 19, 1994)
    -OBITUARY: THE WOUND THAT WOULD NOT HEAL Vietnam changed Lewis B. Puller Jr.'s life 26 years ago - and led to his suicide last week ( PAUL WITTEMAN, TIME)
    -The Funeral of Lewis Burwell Puller, Jr.
    -Lewis Burwell Puller, Jr., First Lieutenant, United States Marine Corps (Arlington Cemetery)
    -Booknotes: Lewis Puller, Jr. (C-SPAN)
    -REVIEW: of Fortunate Son, The Wreckage of an American War (William Styron, NY Times Book Review)
    -REVIEW: of Fortunate Son, A Hero's Son Tells of Another Kind of Heroism (HERBERT MITGANG, NY Times)
    -ESSAY: Who Killed The Pig? (Rod "Chic" Cicchetto)
    -STATEMENT: President's Statement on Death of Lewis Puller
    -REMARKS:  May 30, 1994  Remarks By The President At Arlington National Cemetery Wreath Ceremony, Arlington National Cemetery
    -POEM: For Lewis B. Puller, Jr. (Maggie Jaffe)
    -Vietnam Veterans Home Page (includes tributes to Puller)
    -REVIEW: of VIETNAM The Necessary War By Michael Lind (Robert G. Kaiser, Washington Post Book World)
 

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