Chronicles Magazine Books In Brief

Books in Brief

In this second volume of the Age of the French Revolution series, first published in 1978, Manceron explores the influence on Europe of both American democratic thought and politics during the American Revolution and early nationalist periods.

Books In Brief

The French dislike what they call “Anglo-American economics” even more than they dislike English and American cookery; also, more recently, progressive Anglo-American views regarding the supposed identicality between the sexes.

Books in Brief

This is the second volume of the author’s biography of Saul Bellow, a massive and no doubt definitive work, minutely researched and very well written.

Books in Brief

Here is no doubt the best, most comprehensive, most politically balanced and appropriately distanced of the now four notable biographies of Charles de Gaulle.

Books in Brief

I need to be fair to this book, because the author, a concert pianist and writer who worked for a decade as a classical-music critic for the New York Times, certainly knows her stuff so far as opera goes.

Books in Brief

Not only is Father Rutler one of the most brilliant priests in the country; he is also one of the finest writers of the English language today.

Books in Brief

In 1935, as president of France, Pierre Laval banned “weapons of war” and decreed that all firearms should be registered with the government.

Books in Brief

Mark Atkins describes himself as a “failed Marine” who has never been in combat and who writes “with the same authority as that little boy who cried, “The Emperor has no clothes!” He is also a businessman who is fully aware that he is neither a...

Books in Brief

This excellent and timely book is of great interest as informed speculation on the future of the United States; at a secondary level, it is a meditation on empire in history.

Books in Brief

Rémi Brague, the French Catholic historian and political philosopher, made his wider reputation in the early 1990’s with his book Europe, la voie romaine, in which he attempted a sketch of what Europe should be following its reunification after...

Books in Brief

The author of this engaging, highly interesting, and extremely well-written book is senior fellow and Hyde Park Resident Historian at the Roosevelt Institute, in addition to holding academic professorships at both Marist and Bard College.

Books in Brief

This is an excellent account—part social, part military, and part political—of the Mexican-American War, fought between 1846 and 1848 and concluded by the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo in 1849 that ceded, essentially, the northern half of Mexico to...

Books in Brief

Professor Lilla’s book, which appeared originally as an essay in the New York Review of Books, has received much attention (almost all of it bad) from liberals angered by its thesis that identity politics as it has developed over the past couple...

Books in Brief

As readers and critics had learned everything that is important to know about Hemingway and his work decades ago, subsequent books about the novelist have concentrated on viewing and re-viewing him from various angles.

Books in Brief

This is an interesting and well-executed account of the compositional, publishing, critical, and popular history of Victor Hugo’s famous novel that may—or may not—be “the novel of the century.”

Books in Brief

This is an excellent and very readable book about the life and work of a man with whose name every educated person is familiar, but about whom (and which) few people in America today know very much, though his 100th birthday in 1869, only a...

Books in Brief

This book continues the arguments historians have made over the past three decades that challenge the long-received and -accepted view of the Habsburg Empire as an anachronism among European states in the 19th century.

Books in Brief

This very excellent and elegantly written book by the editor of the Adams Papers between 1983 and 2001 draws on the second American President’s entire corpus of political writing, from his books and pamphlets to his letters and diary entries.

Books in Brief

This highly readable biography of one of the most brilliant and remarkable rogues in history is, I suppose, a work of popular biography. But what biography of Casanova would not be “popular”?

Books in Brief

This superb and marvelously readable work of social and political history, drawn from a wide variety of personal and official documents and records, recounts the first weeks of World War I as they were experienced by the French people, the French...

Books in Brief

This book is probably too academic to suit the taste of the general reader. It is, however, eminently sensible and notably well written for an academic text.

Books in Brief

After the first hundred pages or so, I found I had to put the book aside for a couple of days before reading on. "Somme" is, without a doubt, the most harrowing war account I have ever read, including Shelby Foote’s Civil War trilogy.

Books in Brief

This sympathetic, indeed deeply moving, biography of the ill-fated king, Louis XVI, is dramatic and mostly well written, save in certain instances where I found the presentation of particular events unclear.

Books in Brief

Professor Wilson of Oxford University argues that the history of the Sanctum Imperium Romanum, despite its centrality to the history of Europe and its immense longevity, has commonly been written piecemeal, as the history of its component parts...

Books in Brief

Alexis de Tocqueville’s wife was Mary Mottley, an Englishwoman. His biographers have never written more than a couple of sentences about her.

Books in Brief

Edwards, a digital-marketing executive, states at the beginning of this book that it was not his intention to write “a rant against all things digital.” Nevertheless, his evaluation of what the digital revolution has wrought comes closer to an...

Brief Mentions

Lynn Nicholas has written the most comprehensive account of the Nazis' attempt to steal, sell, dismantle, and destroy Europe's artistic heritage, but her stunning illustrations nearly tell the story for her.

Paranoia as Prudence

Edith Efron's purpose is not to decide scientific controversies, but to inform us of the intense disputes hid­den by regulatory officials.

Commendables

Thinking Clearly About War, Clear-Eyed Southerner, From the Wilderness to the White House, Satire In and Out of Season.

In Focus

Light From the East, Moll and Mouse

Success by Association

Gertrude Stein may be the only official member of "The Lost Generation" who has not been disemboweled by literary analysts. Stein's circle-biographer James R. Mellow called it a "Charmed Circle" in the title of his 1974 book was not restricted to...

Useless Idiots

John P. Roche, academic dean and professor of civilization and foreign affairs at Tufts University and a leading analyst of Marxist intrigue and aggression, knows why the "communists" will never take over. In The History and Impact of...

Required Reading

Larkin seems to have given up writing verse these days. On the other hand, he writes essays and re­ views only under compulsion. Required Writing is an anthology of various pieces written over a period of nearly 30 years. They are as cranky and...

Nest of Vipers

It may hurt, but it is useful to know that in matters of foreign translations available at our publishers and bookstores, we live in a well-guarded ghetto. There are protective turrets in the ghetto's wall, called Sartre, Beauvoir, Gunter Grass,...

Perceptibles

Howard Thurman, Robert V. Hine

Waste of Money

Media MIA's, Power to the Professors

Notables – Bathos

Comment

Anthony Powell, Russell Kirk

The Radical Virus

The pursuit of what is best for one's country makes at times for strange bedfellows and surprising ironies.

Reality by the Tail

Under the guise of serious literary treatment of the social-political problems of her country, she indulges her appetite for faddish philosophical- aesthetic playfulness. It is not a successful mix.

De-Filed

Although Penn Kimball the citizen is the victim of a moral and legal injustice documented in this book, Penn Kimball the journalist and political liberal has been subjected to a kind of poetic justice.

These Foolish Things

Liberalism, as we know it now, may be therefore, a step beyond folly — a halfway position between the conscious agent of defeat, and the foolish individual depicted by Tuchman and Shirer.

Confluences

From Dewey to Huey, Pathetic Comedy

Commendables

A Dangerous Classic, Ideological Body Count, Fighting the Media Moguls, Of Puerile Pedagogy

Notables

Building, Two Cultures

Red Hot Harlequin Romances

In an afterword to one of the stories contained in You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down, Ms. Walker admits "I am sometimes naive and sentimental." On this point at least, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens does much to prove her right.

Little Brother & Kid Sister

Mrs. Bird's book is a rambling reflection of the world that she envisions: a world where everyone writes books despite having nothing to say.

Basking in the Afterglow

It would appear that postwar Western Europe represents not a renaissance, as Mayne seems to think, but the afterglow of a spiritually moribund society that will inexorably and swiftly lose its physical existence as well.

The Joy of Cents

If government can manage the economy successfully, as Godley and Cripps suggest, think of the joyful politics which could emanate from this intellectual base. But such an outcome is doubtful.

In Focus

Of Careers, Criminals, and Creative Writers; Word Processors

Waste of Money

Frustration, Dirty-Scalpel Politics, Who Cares?, Puppets for Propagandists

Perceptibles

George W. S. Trow, Ken Auletta, Gerard K. O'Neill

Art

“Someone remarked I had a real talent for ephemera. … I accepted this as a compliment.”

In Focus – Semitrivial Pursuits

Initiate Abroad

Mark Twain was so disgusted by the superficial and sentimental nonsense in most American travel books that he said he wanted to eat "a tourist for breakfast." But instead of devouring American tourists he delightfully caricatured their bungling...

Liberal Worship and Conservative Judgment

While Ms. Oates leads the nauseous public chorus of liberal critics hailing narcissistic artists as gods, Dr. Lynn stands as a courageous blasphemer who stills the hosannas with a confident and resounding verdict: “This is nonsense, and there’s...

Eviscerating the Heartland

That even so minor a talent as Vidal’s should be wasted on what he chooses to call novels is something to be lamented as one more sign of the strangely troubled times in which we find ourselves.

Beyond the Public View

Konwicki’s novel should bring to mind the difference between the self-indulgent, masochistic imaginings that make men cry for the release of catastrophe.

Transcendence of Mere Opinion

We no longer can afford art for art’s sake, but must appeal to our artists to conserve those higher values and to make them accessible to all of us.

Traveling in Spiraling Circles

As a memoir of a competent journalist’s daily experiences in often unusual surroundings, Salisbury’s book possesses some merit; as an attempt to analyze Soviet behavior, it is as hopelessly simplistic as the editorial page of the New York Times...

Small is Significant

Perhaps Geoffrey Norman should stick to wildlife and leave the matters of man to those who willingly confront those concerns.

Myths, Visions, Passions

Both poets sustained a remarkably passionate lyricism in their verse until the ends of their careers, and both were inspired by a mystical concept of the poetic process and of poetry as a higher truth. At this point, though, the comparison breaks...

Constructive Criticism — Sometimes

Hook offers no real explanation for the West's decline and the "collapse of its morality." He is clearly anguished and puzzled by it, though he rightly does not despair. Still, without an explanation, the book suffers.

Before the Borscht Belt — and Beyond

When public humor is either shallow, because liberalism is blind to real moral crisis, or cynical, because ideology fosters resentment, it ceases to mediate, to come between us and our fallen condition with the saving grace of laughter.

In Focus

Simpering for the Soviets; Cabals, Criminals, & Ghostbusters; Stylishly Abtruse; Numbers Without Numbers

Perceptibles

Hugh Bayless, David Sundelson

Art

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