Book Description
This definitive survey examines the impact of nuclear weaponry on national security issues. Written by an experienced author and founder of the Peace and Common Security Institute in Berkeley, California, this text describes how current nuclear dilemmas have developed out of past choices and events. The final chapter of this chronologically organized text covers events that took place from 1985-1991, making the material relevant to the post-Cold War era.
Book Description
Uncovering startling connections between the Cold War and family life, a noted historian challenges assumptions of the "happy days" of the 1950s.
Customer Reviews:
Many Shortcomings.......2007-07-10
Elaine Tyler May's Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era encapsulates the life of the average American family from the decade prior to World War II through the decade of the 1980s, primarily focusing on the Cold War period of the 1940s through the 1960s. Although the threat of the Cold War and use of atomic weapons always loomed in the background, May's work essentially emphasized the social and economic happenings of the time. Homeward Bound is an easy read with each chapter following a format that introduces the reader to the chapter's subject, backs it with statistical data, and provides a summary. And lest the reader think the book is balanced and fair to men and women, later chapters show the author's true intent which is to show how American women were trapped into becoming housewives and not being able to explore their own interests or careers in favor of their husbands'. Nine chapters guide the reader through the Great Depression, World War II, the Eisenhower years, the turbulent decade of the 1960s and ends with the election of Ronald Reagan. Since the book was originally published in 1988, there is a follow-up section for the new 1999 edition. Further, there are several appendices with statistical data describing the demographics of the people about whom it is written. Also, the questionnaire from the Kelly Longitudinal Study, which is the basis for the data provided in the text, is also included.
Vice President Richard Nixon's "kitchen debate" with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev is the opening salvo in a book that paints a bleak picture for American women in the 1940s and 1950s. Much of the information provided to support the author's thesis is from the Kelly Longitudinal Study, which consisted of surveys of six hundred white middle-class families and spanned the period from the late-1930s to about 1955. Families actually began in the 1930s and 1940s for security and economic reasons and "...laid the foundation for a commitment to a stable home life...." Even though women worked outside the home and were in many ways functional within the job market, they were discouraged from working during the time of the Great Depression, since working women took jobs away from men. This changed after America's entry into World War II where full employment existed and the need for workers to drive the military production machine required that women enter the workforce. However, once the war ended and veterans returned from overseas, many women left the job market on their own or were forced out so that men could be employed. The expectation was for women to become housewives and mothers and cater to their families rather than have a career of their own. In fact, many government officials, like FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, for example, stated that being a housewife was one of the most important careers a woman could have to provide stability in the country as an attempt to thwart the growth of communism.
Many women were not satisfied with that life. Although the marriage rate increased significantly and the birth rate jumped after WWII (producing the "Baby Boom" generation), women from the survey experienced a sense of despair in their lives due to their societal subservience to their husbands. Though many believed raising a family and keeping a happy home was quite satisfactory to them, many women were depressed and unsatisfied with their lives in general. May describes in great detail the miserable lives of many of these women whose husbands treated them badly, were not affectionate or sexually gratifying, and who were inattentive fathers. The life of the average housewife was gloomy because she worked where she lived whereas men worked away from the house and saw their home as a sanctuary for them to relax and, seemingly, be waited on hand-and-foot by their jobless wife. Certainly divorce was available for these women; but, unless their husband was abusive or adulterous, most did not exercise that option since a high social stigma was attached to it during that era. Further, from an economic standpoint, most women with children could not survive on their own. Indeed, the economic fortunes of divorced women declined while that of divorced men increased.
Consumerism and the ideal American family bring the reader back to the Nixon - Khrushchev debate. New appliances, new homes, new cars, and other "big ticket" items were the staple of American life and what separated the U.S. from the U.S.S.R. and made American appear more affluent then their Communist counterparts. Not only did Americans want more things, they also wanted more children. Couples who had no children were seen as unsuccessful. "Large families were an indication of a man's potency and ability to provide and a woman's success as a professional homemaker." Women should be able to manage a larger household, after all, because many of the appliances (e.g., washing machines, vacuum cleaners, and electric irons) were invented to make their lives easier and thus enable them to have more time to raise children and keep a clean house.
This era of the nuclear family began to unravel in the early 1960s with the publication of the best-selling book The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan. In it, she questioned the status quo and "...spoke for thousands like herself whose dreams and desires withered under the weight of domesticity." Moreover, as the children of the baby boom era came of age themselves, they rebelled against the lifestyles of their parents and turned the 1960s in a decade that saw "free love" and the move away from the nuclear family. This brought about cohabitation without marriage, premarital sex, and an increase in the divorce rate. The author concluded that the conservative movement that helped Ronald Reagan to become elected president and harkened to return to the days of the nuclear family and the stable 1950s was misguided because that era actually diminished the role of women and prevented them from realizing their potential.
As stated earlier, the author shows herself as a feminist whose goal was to prove that women were kept down in subservience to men after World War II. From a statistical standpoint, since the surveyed families were mostly located in the New England area of the country it is debatable that the data the survey provided is applicable to the rest of the country. Basically, twelve hundred adults were surveyed from a 1950 population of over one hundred and fifty million. Does that really represent the American population as a whole, especially when the survey is geographic specific? Further, May is critical of the conservative movement and the supporters of Reagan which further paints her as a liberal feminist. Although there is nothing wrong with having that viewpoint, it diminishes the work in general. What starts out to be a statistical analysis of married couples during a specific time period results in a generalization of the country as a whole and sheds a negative light on men of that time. Although Homeward Bound gives the reader a glimpse of a time in recent American history, it should not be considered the decisive work for which to judge that generation.
How the Hetero-normative, Racialized, Exclusive Suburban Family Ideal Became a Unifying Aspiration of American Culture.......2006-03-25
This work contends that there was an anomalous rise in "marriage, parenthood, and traditional gender roles" in the post-World War II United States that was pan-racial, pan-economic, pan-ethnic, and pan-regional. It attributes this to social constructions of home and family that responded to governmental policy aims and cold war anxieties. The work seeks unearth what, precisely, drives the anxieties behind these social formations and why they dramatically distort the post-World War II child bearing generation from the radicalism that preceded and proceeded them.
May ascribes the geopolitical parlance of "containment" to the domestic cultural policies of the cold war United States. She asserts that the rhetoric and practice of the nuclear family served to contain subversive sexual and political behavior that might evoke contestation of gendered postwar consumerism, masculinist renderings of science qua exceptionalist prosperity, and endanger the social practices of unity, security, and stability that were understood to confer qualitative global advantage in the cold war. The author also engages the nuclear family as an aspiration that mobilized the majority of United States residents who were racially, economically, or otherwise excluded from its suburban actualization. The capacity of family to frame the intelligibility of "prosperity" for economic actors who were conferred unequal advantage is key, May suggests, to its postwar centrality in visions of an abundant and classless society.
In this context, May's suburbs emerge as liminal spaces that both enact and resolve the contradictions between pre-and postwar culture, replacing the aspiration for equal condition with the condition of uniform aspiration, reifying romance as the mutual consent of liberal individuals yet encasing it in an exclusionary propertization of private life, and substituting ethnic kinship and working class consciousness that situated life in power with a homogenous whiteness that rendered power unintelligible. This is artfully demonstrated as the text traces the dispositions and cohesions of families from the New Deal era thru the early 1960s.
The author's hybrid methodology combines statistical demographic data with qualitative analysis of cultural texts. May notes assiduously the key contradiction within this data; that while the imagery of suburban familial prosperity presented a level of prosperity that was realistically inaccessible for the majority of United States residents who encountered it, it nonetheless correlates with a strong voluntary entrance into the social formations of that aspiration that is evident across demographics. May goes as far as to entertain that the disconnect between the consumer aspirations of marginalized peoples and their social reality may have contributed to their motivation to pursue social change, also noting the strong political incentives to resolve visible racial inequality during the cold war. Indeed, the phenomenon through which the rhetoric of the Civil Rights movement became centered around an actualization of the postwar patriarchal family and economic opportunity--it was examples of consumer exclusion from diners, hotels, and municipal services as well as his daughter's weeping at a whites-only amusement park that Martin Luther King rooted his initial moral appeals in-would constitute an entirely separate study. This, if anything, is the question one is left with at the conclusion of Homeward Bound. To what extent has the lasting postwar articulation of the nuclear suburban home as the fruit of prosperity become the constantly greener grass to marginalized peoples, and how has this interfaced with social movements, rebellion, and self-destruction?
An intriguing premise.......2005-11-01
From the 1940s through the early 1960s, Americans married in greater numbers, at a younger age, and with a greater resistance to divorce than either their parents' or their children's generation. There occurred a remarkable dash into the domestic embrace of marriage and parenthood as American women abandoned their wartime jobs and joyfully rushed into the arms of returning World War II soldiers.
But what provided the impetus for this yearning? The World War II generation was raised by parents who had come of age basking in the hedonistic pleasures of the Roaring Twenties following their return from the First World War. And their Baby-Boom counter-culture offspring were certainly no traditionalists. Both of these generations had in fact challenged conventional sexual norms while pushing the divorce rate up and the birth rate down. What then made the World War II generation different? What motivated them to embrace the roles of the traditional family with such desperate fervor and commitment? Homeward Bound is Elaine Tyler May's attempt to explain this sociological phenomenon by linking it to international politics.
According to Tyler May, it was the Cold War that provided the impetus. Americans embraced domesticity during the early years of the Cold War because "the home seemed to offer a secure private nest removed from the dangers of the outside world." This mass retreat to the privacy and security of the home was in response to the twin threats of communist encroachment and potential nuclear attack by the Soviet Union. Specifically, Tyler May contends that the U.S. foreign policy of communist "containment" gave rise to the parallel societal view that the home could effectively contain the economic, sexual, and social desires of American women and men.
To this end, the dynamics of the home required the rigid adherence to gender roles. Specifically, societal pressure induced women to marry young, give birth early and often, shun career aspirations, and stay home to raise their multiple offspring. Men, for their part, were expected to provide a steady and reliable stream of income for their growing families, regardless of the frustrating and stifling constraints imposed by their employers.
Rather than painting a Norman Rockwell picture of comfortable domesticity, Tyler May chronicles a smoldering dissatisfaction with these rigid gender roles, causing guilt and resentment in the supposedly "happy days" world of the World War II generation.
The book is divided into nine chapters covering a variety of topics relating to home life, career choices, sex, reproduction, and consumerism. It concludes with a chapter relating how and why the Baby Boom generation rebelled against their parent's obsession with security.
Effective use is made of magazine articles, books (both popular and scholarly), newspaper reports, documentary films, government publications, and Hollywood movies. A revealing poll in which periodic surveys were taken among housewives and husbands - called the Kelly Longitudinal Studies - provides a wealth of fascinating and insightful data that is skillfully woven throughout the book
Tyler May makes a convincing case that the Cold War created a uneasy state of mind among Americans, fostering a "bunker mentality" that coerced the World War II generation into opting for security over independence and personal fulfillment: secure jobs, secure homes, and secure marriages in a secure country.
homeward bound.......2004-09-21
The book Homeward Bound properly illustrates the hardships that women had to endure throughout the depression, WWII, and the Cold War era. It shows that though women were given brief moments of emancipation they were always held back by a Male dominant society paranoid of their unrestrained freedom and sexuality. It was not until the feminist movement and the erosion of the Cold War Ideology that women realized they deserved more than the status quo and fought for their equality. This book illustrates that women were not housewives because they were well suited due to their differences from men; instead, it was male domination that caused difference and ultimately forced women in to submission. Elaine Tyler May is very convincing in her arguments about the ties between the various eras and their effect on the American family and gender roles/gender inequality. At times she may rely too much on the KLS study, which only covers the more affluent part of society during the 40's, 50's, and 60's. Nonetheless her book makes bold thought provoking claims that shed new light on the "Happy Days" of the 1950's.
Uneven in examining reproductive rights.......2002-11-19
I purchased this book for my graduate-level independent studies course hoping to find definitive answers to a hunch post-war controversy over reproductve rights actually had a larger tie-in to the era's blatant anti-communism.
After all, the advent of antiseptic surgery and antibiotics meant the driving reason behind 19th century anti-abortion campaigns was effectively negated by the post-war period, so opponents of women's rights had to construct a new justifcation for extending the laws beyond their original intent. Abortion was now dangerous because it increased women's autonomy and freedom.
While May does address reproductive policy, this work suprisingly does not delve heavily into how anti-communism and reproductive bias paralleled eachother.Considering many post-war restrictions (pregnancy-related job firing and school expulsion co-existed with illegality of abortion and contraception) were directly related to women's reproductive potential, a considerable amount of research was missing from her book. The research presented skimmed what I had already discovered from Solinger et al's other works and did not provide the insight I was desperatley seeking.
Because May is able to tie anti-communist objectives into television and other cultural arenas, I remain puzzled by the selective exclusion. However well written structurally, it also seemed as if she were skipping around the same argument, but electing not to explore it for whatever reason.
This book is not a good candidate for work with reproductive policy, but would be an excellent choice for a general study of American women's post-war political agency.
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Defense Relations between Australia and Indonesia in the Post-Cold War Era: (Contributions in Military Studies)
Bilveer Singh
Manufacturer: Greenwood Press
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Book Description
Recent years have seen dramatic shifts in the nature of Australian-Indonesian relations, and this in turn has had a great impact on the strategic partnership that had gradually come into existence between the two regional powers. Against the backdrop of rapid strategic, political, economic, social, and technological changes occurring on a global scale, Australian foreign policy efforts at cooperation with its largest and nearest Asian neighbor have changed as well--largely as a result of domestic political considerations. Reaching a high point under Prime Minister Keating, defense relations soured considerably and suddenly after 1999. Singh provides a non-partisan account of the shift from partnership to cold peace and an examination of how it has affected the bilateral, regional, and global security environment. The Indonesian public and political elite have become hostile toward Australia as a result of her perceived role in the birth of an independent East Timor. Indonesians are also increasingly suspicious of Australian intensions toward their own country, with many believing that Canberra would like to repeat its East Timor success in Papua, thereby leading to the disintegration of Indonesia itself. John Howard's pro-Western policies are also viewed as a return to Australian projection of itself as a "Western outpost" on the fringes of Asia. As the strategic cooperation between the two nations has faltered, it has had tremendous implications for the defense and security outlook of both powers. The world cannot afford to ignore this possible threat to regional stability.
Book Description
Algeria sits at the crossroads of the Atlantic, European, Arab, and African worlds. Yet, unlike the wars in Korea and Vietnam, Algeria's fight for independence has rarely been viewed as an international conflict. Even forty years later, it is remembered as the scene of a national drama that culminated with Charles de Gaulle's decision to "grant" Algerians their independence despite assassination attempts, mutinies, and settler insurrection. Yet, as Matthew Connelly demonstrates, the war the Algerians fought occupied a world stage, one in which the U.S. and the USSR, Israel and Egypt, Great Britain, Germany, and China all played key roles. Recognizing the futility of confronting France in a purely military struggle, the Front de Liberation Nationale instead sought to exploit the Cold War competition and regional rivalries, the spread of mass communications and emigrant communities, and the proliferation of international and non-governmental organizations. By harnessing the forces of nascent globalization they divided France internally and isolated it from the world community. And, by winning rights and recognition as Algeria's legitimate rulers without actually liberating the national territory, they rewrote the rules of international relations. Based on research spanning three continents and including, for the first time, the rebels' own archives, this study offers a landmark reevaluation of one of the great anti-colonial struggles as well as a model of the new international history. It will appeal to historians of post-colonial studies, twentieth-century diplomacy, Europe, Africa, and the Middle East.
Customer Reviews:
Absolute Garbage.......2007-02-23
Connelly's book is one of the worst available on the Algerian War to date, narrowly beaten by the atrocity that is Irwin Wall's account. There seems to be a tendency on the part of English-speaking scholars to attribute to the Algerian War a global aspect that really was not that important to the outcome of the war, and even more bizarre, attributing a crucial role to the United States. Connelly's animosity toward the French shows through clearly, and prevents any sort of objective account of the war.
Try Alistair Horne's book, or the works by Martin Alexander for much better works in English, and ignore this one, it's not worth your time.
Relevant Reading for these Times.......2003-06-25
This diplomatic history of the Algerian independence movement offers insight into the events of the past year, i.e., Iraq II. As the book points out, fifty years ago American stood on the right side of history, and France faced the opposition of the world. Interesting sidenotes include France's dirty tricks by its special forces. Read this history and learn how Dulles and Eisenhower would be doves in the current US administration.
Book Description
In 1957 Ghana became one of the first sub-Saharan African nations to gain independence from colonial rule. Over the next decade, hundreds of African Americans--including Martin Luther King Jr., George Padmore, Malcolm X, Maya Angelou, Richard Wright, Pauli Murray, and Muhammed Ali--visited or settled in Ghana. Kevin K. Gaines explains what attracted these expatriates to Ghana and how their new community was shaped by the convergence of the Cold War, the rise of the U.S. civil rights movement, and the decolonization of Africa.
Posing a direct challenge to U.S. hegemony, Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana's president, promoted a vision of African liberation, continental unity, and West Indian federation. Although the number of African American expatriates in Ghana was small, in espousing a transnational American citizenship defined by solidarities with African peoples, these activists waged along with their allies in the United States a fundamental, if largely forgotten, struggle over the meaning and content of the formal American citizenship conferred on African Americans by civil rights reform legislation.
Book Description
In these provocative and engaging writings, Mr. Kramer explores, in effect, the intellectual history of the cold war and its divisive impact on our politics and culture. Tracing the critical debate over communism and modernism, he surveys the writers who were in the forefront of that debate and the issues that animated their criticism and controversies. An honest, unsparing, and often devastating analysis. --Kirkus Reviews
Customer Reviews:
Do these people matter?.......2004-01-12
In his introduction, Hilton Kramer declares himself to be a "partisan" of artistic "modernism" and a "liberal anti-Communist." These essays are, then, a critique of twentieth-century Western leftist/modernist intellectuals by one of their own.
Much of the book is taken up with denunciations of the Stalinism which was rampant among Western intellectuals in the 1930s and '40s. Kramer is here generally on target: there is no longer any honest doubt that Alger Hiss was a Soviet spy or that Lillian Hellman was a pathologically dishonest Stalinist stooge.
Even towards those intellectuals who were not tools of Stalinism, Kramer is unsparing. Although he seems in some ways to admire Mary McCarthy, he declares, "Mary McCarthy's politics were like her sex life -- promiscuous and unprincipled, more a question of opportunity than of commitment or belief."
The greater interest of the book lies in the hints Kramer offers the reader as to what went wrong with the whole twentieth-century intellectual enterprise. The author is never able to draw these hints together into a coherent explanation, perhaps because he himself continues to share the basic premises underlying the twentieth-century intellectual catastrophe.
Ernest Gellner once suggested that the rise of Anglo-American "linguistic philosophy" in the twentieth century was a consequence of verbalist intellectuals, having been displaced by modern science, trying to create for themselves a new niche which would justify their own skills of verbal manipulation.
The same analysis explains the intellectuals' attraction to both Marxism and "modernism."
In discussing modern art, Kramer refers approvingly to the "culture of modernism, with its 'difficult' texts requiring lengthy and laborious study..." He specifically lavishes praise on Clement Greenberg, one of the most influential of modernist art critics.
Why it is that "'difficult' texts requiring lengthy and laborious study..." are per se a good thing, Kramer does not say. The answer of course is that such texts provide a raison d'etre for verbalist intellectuals who possess no actual knowledge or any useful expertise. Tom Wolfe, in "The Painted Word," developed this point in a brutally brilliant (and hilarious) attack on artistic modernism, focusing specifically on Kramer's hero Clem Greenberg: modern art is nothing but illustrations for the insanely convoluted and incomprehensible scribblings of self-important twentieth-century verbalist intellectuals.
Similarly, Marxism assigns to intellectuals a far more exalted status than they would otherwise appear to deserve: whatever the ultimate metaphysical role of the proletariat, it is, in practice, the intellectuals, not the poor workers, who have grasped the Marxian dynamics of history. It is therefore the intellectuals who are fitted to run the show under Marxism.
That modernism and Marxism would appeal to intellectuals is therefore obvious. But does it matter? How could a small band of discontented intellectuals affect society at large?
Kramer again offers us hints of how relatively small numbers of leftist/modernist intellectuals spread their influence throughout American society. Kramer explains that Stalinists insinuated themselves into such "capitalist" institutions as Time magazine, the New York Times, and the universities, and, in some cases, received monetary subsidies from the Soviet Union.
The Soviets never accepted modern art, so Soviet funds were not available to fund artistic modernism. Curiously, funding for political leftists who espoused artistic modernism was provided by the American CIA! Kramer explains in some detail that the CIA-funded "Congress for Cultural Freedom" exhibited an "over dependence on the political Left as the intellectual mainstay of the Congress..." He adds approvingly, and not surprisingly given his own leftist leanings, that this "may indeed have been necessary given the realities of the moment..."
The most bizarrely fascinating essay in the book discusses the famous "Bloomsbury group" -- which included Vrginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, John Maynard Keynes, etc. The phrase "moral decadence" is not adequate to capture the picture Kramer paints.
For example, Vanessa Bell, sister of Vrigina Woolf and the pivotal figure in the group, although married to Clive Bell, had a child by Duncan Grant, whose own real romantic interest was not Vanessa Bell but his own gay lover, David Garnett. In a final weird twist, the gay lover Garnett ended up marrying the illegitimate daughter when she matured.
The Bloomsburyites, who prided themselves on their sexual openness and lack of hypocrisy, kept the whole strange matter secret from the unfortunate girl who thought her biological father was Clive Bell.
In the early twentieth century, the Bloomsbury ethos was the preserve of a tiny group of upper-class aesthetes -- although Bloomsbury member John Maynard Keynes did succeed in selling Western governments upon an economic theory built upon the take-no-thought-for-the-morrow Bloomsbury ethos, with a resulting near collapse in the value of Western currencies.
But that ethos has now trickled down widely to the middle and working class in America, as is illustrated, for example, by the infamous Jerry Springer television program: Springer is a twenty-first century pop-culture version of the Bloomsbury group.
As an old-fashioned liberal (what is nowadays called a "neoconservative"), Hilton Kramer is an apologist for the basic political, social, and cultural institutions of the twentieth century. While he deplores much of what his intellectual colleagues have done to our society, he lacks the vantage point to see that the early twentieth century liberal "advances" in the power of government, the structure of education, etc. made this destruction possible.
That Kramer himself is now often dubbed a conservative, rather than, as he himself confesses in his introduction, a liberal, is a sign of the lack of any real conservative alternative or response to the catastrophic social and intellectual decline that constituted the twentieth century.
Nonetheless, if Kramer can offer no cure, "Twilight of the Intellectuals" is a fascinating and readable look at some of those intellectuals who helped cause the illnesses from which we and our society now suffer.
Caveat.......2003-08-12
Although I have a great interest in the topic, and I found its title promising, I could not bear myself to finish this book. Besides acknowledging the acritical position of some intellectuals toward the Soviet Union and Stalin, I did not find much of interest in this book. Kramer's book is another exemplar of the usual tirade of rightwing intellectuals against the left and liberals in general. I found particularly deplorable Kramer's intend to rehabilitate the memory of Joseph McCarthy (See "The Blacklist Revised"). In this regard, even Ann Coulter is more refreshing.
Got my eyes on you baby cause you dance so good.......2001-07-18
With this book, Hilton Kramer, a Cold-War anti-Communist Liberal of the last half of the 20th century, fills in many historical gaps for younger seekers of intellectual purity. While the book does a credible job explaining shifting differences of cold-war opinion amongst leftist academics and ideologues, it begs us to consider how otherwise intelligent people could continue to support tyranny in the face of such incontrovertible evidence of its evil. Kramer cites the verbal and media assault on anyone daring to question the tenets of the Cold War Socialist Left. He outlines the criticisms of Alexander Solzhinitsyn by George Steiner, the diatribes of Lillian Hellman, that staunch supporter of Stalinism, and the scurrilousness of Mary McCarthy, the pro-Hanoi apologist. He shines light on the Communists in Hollywood and the media and the many ways in which they aided the Soviet cause.
Starting with the intellectual rejection of Whittaker Chambers, in favor of the Soviet spy Alger Hiss, we are treated to a travesty of heresies that have yet to be renounced by their proponents. Kramer points out that Bard College today has an academic chair in their Humanities department in Alger Hiss's name. By the same token, women's studies departments at many universities still use "I, Rigoberta Minchu" as a text even while knowing that she made the story up. Current Writers who have kept on with this tradition of making it up as they go along, in the name of the class warrior socialist cause, are Mike Barnicle of the Boston Globe, Stephen Glass of the New Republic, Joseph Ellis of Mount Hollyoke and Janet Cooke of the Washington Post; and these are just the ones who got caught. Even though they are a tribe of diminishing numbers, the shrillness of their followers is reminiscent of the Pod People in "the Invasion of the Body Snatchers". They still make their presence known in the universities, worshippers of their secular religion, their social studies professor's a fit for the over 50 white guy demographic of those remaining listeners of Pacifica Radio. Even with Cold War Left intellectualism "water over the dam", we still stand witness to the twilight of the intellectual era while we watch a continued post-modernist assault on free market values. In the war of ideas, they still fight on the side of our political enemies, and their fight is as relentless as it is prolonged. The saving grace is that their numbers continue to dwindle as their message becomes ever more diluted and confused. We can only sit in awe as we watch them "rage against the machine" and tilt at the windmills of free market capitalism. The Ruckus society, Greenpeace, PETA and Friends of the Earth come to mind.
The book outlines the details of urgent political debates that tore apart friendships and sundered institutions. Kramer gives life to these issues that animated controversies, but ended in the triumph of a new sensibility over modernism, what he calls a strange fate for liberal anti-communism. What's so interesting is how people like Sidney Hook, Lionel Trilling and George Orwell were able to see the truth where other fellow travelers would not. It seems that the rigid ones suffered, and suffer still, from the condition that Thomas Sowell often refers to as compartmentalized brain syndrome. Hilton Kramer has done a fine job for those of us who are younger but still curious about this struggle of Cold war peripatetic's espousing their tale of the inevitability of a Marxist heaven on earth as the logical future for all mankind. This cruel plan, which oversaw the deaths of more than 100 million people in the 20th century, never succeeded and some of the credit has to go to those intellectuals with the courage to see the error of their ways. Hilton Kramer gives them their due.
An aerial view of the culture war.......2001-07-04
In a 1994 interview on C-SPAN's Booknotes, reporter and critic John Corry told how politically one-sided the _New York Times_' newsroom was in 1980. In that year, of all the reporters and editors on staff, he only knew of one person who voted for Ronald Reagan, and that was the paper's art critic, Hilton Kramer. Kramer left a couple of years later, continuing his art criticism in the _New York Observer_. But he also set out to do battle with the cultural Left, that "herd of independent minds", in Harold Rosenberg's famous phrase. Eventually, he founded the _New Criterion_, an intellectual journal, which features some of the finest cultural criticism on offer today. This book, Twilight of the Intellectuals, is as much a retrospective of his often lonely mission, as it is a survey of the political climate of American intellectual culture in this century.
_Twilight_ differs from Paul Johnson's _Intellectuals_ in treating only 20th century intellectuals. Plus, Kramer's high culture background allows him to provide the reader with more insight into his subjects' worlds, as opposed to Johnson's uniform tarring of his as scoundrels (mostly accurately, though). Kramer even expresses some nostalgia for some of the people here, such as Kenneth Tynan, giving him his artistic due over the political divide.
But in the main, his work here is a series of political polemics. "Socialism is the religion people get when they lose their religion," is how the Catholic intellectual Richard John Neuhaus described the mindset that Kramer battles here. Throughout, Kramer selects his old articles with the intent of fixing the truth about influential leftist intellectuals firmly in the cultural memory. People like Lillian Hellman, Alger Hiss, Dwight MacDonald, Mary McCarthy, and such are all known qualities now, and do not need to be refuted afresh. But they still hold places of honor in institutions where like-minded intellectuals cluster, so the task of telling the truth about them is an ongoing one. The progressive myth surrounding Hiss is still so thick that Kramer felt compelled to include two essays about his case.
His praise of Sidney Hook, the lone ranger of socialism, is fulsome, and deservedly so. Hook did much of the heavy lifting in building the Marxist mindset among American intellectuals in the Thirties, and then atoned for it with a long, noble and lonely career as an anti-communist cold warrior. He oddly tags Hook for a philistine, though, for having pooh-poohed an anti-communist arts festival with the comment that artistic greatness could appear in dictatorships, too. Hook was right on that point, though, in my opinion. A musical program of Shostakovich and Prokovieff at their best would more than stand comparison with a program of contemporaneous Western composers, caged birds though the Soviet artists were otherwise.
His estimation of Saul Bellow may be a little unfair. Bellow has never been known for being a brawler, which may explain Kramer's disappointment in his seeming acquiescence to PC attacks against him. One _Herzog_, one _Mr. Sammler's Planet_, ought to be enough to ask from any writer's career, without also being called upon to spend creative energy in opinion journal polemics.
A print reviewer of this book commented on how entering the culture wars must have retarded Kramer's potential as a critic, by draining his powers. I don't know about that, but he makes a convincing Horatius At The Gate, giving battle to the herd of independent minds, who marched in leftist lockstep so disgracefully, for so long.
Uncle Joe's Cafe.......2001-05-02
Like most people born in the Sixties, I was taught by the commissars to exercise proper moral outrage at McCarthy and to ridicule the excesses of anti-communism. It wasn't until I was well out of school, when I read Witness by Whittaker Chambers, that I realized there was another side to the story, one more deserving of my sympathy.
I learned that the excesses of the "Red Scare" had not proved it wrong. There had been Communists in Hollywood, in the media, in politics, and in government, including Alger Hiss, a State Department official under FDR who had been revealed to be a spy by Chambers, himself a former Communist.
Despite the exoneration of Chambers and the slow trickle of information about the Soviet Union after its fall, the Left has never come clean about its failures on this issue. Hilton Kramer tries to set the record straight in this collection of his essays, most of them published first in his monthly review, The New Criterion, by telling some of the individual stories within the intellectual history of the Cold War (roughly 1930-1990). Kramer examines the impact of the politics of the Thirties and Sixties and the gradual fall of what Raymond Aron called "the two avant-gardes," Marxism and Modernism.
These were the days of coffee-house revolutionaries who had either taken leave of their senses or were willing to do anything in the name of Stalinism. Some of them were acquaintances of Kramer; some were merely part of the cultural smog that everyone inhaled. They were divided into the Communist Left and the anti-communist Left, with the latter typically excommunicated whenever it attempted to reveal the truth about Stalin.
The excesses of the anti-anti-communists were many. Kramer found Sidney Hook's autobiography a key text in the literature of anti-communism, but historian Arthur Schlesinger thought Hook exaggerated the influence of Communism on America. Lillian Hellman claimed it was the anti-communists who were the real threat to democracy. Susan Sontag called the white race the cancer of history. George Steiner was outraged to hear Solzhenitsyn say it was Lenin, not Hitler or Stalin, who created the slave-labor camp and that Soviet terror was worse than National Socialism. Mary McCarthy defended Communism in Hanoi and attacked the anti-communism of a fellow Leftist, George Orwell. Alfred Kazin tried to drum Saul Bellow out of the club because Bellow departed from Left-liberal orthodoxy. William Phillips, an editor of Partisan Review, wrote that defectors from Communist idealism, like himself, were often denied entry into various journals and university jobs.
If all of this sounds like puritanical, it is because the Left has often brought religious overtones to its politics. Despite claims to tolerance, liberals punished their dissenters harshly. But the untold story is the one Hilton Kramer has begun-of those who sacrificed and suffered because of their integrity and their loyalty to the truth.
Customer Reviews:
Proof that Reagan had one of the best Staff/Cabinet in histo.......2001-04-26
Fantastic book! It's a real pleasure to see some of the lower level staff/cabinet people given credit for an historic 8 years. Before I read this book, I had no idea who Richard Pearl was and now I understand why the Reagan Presidency was noted for it's "hawkish" pro-defense policies. The best history reading is one that reads like a novel while still able to get across all pertinate points and this book does so overwhelmingly. "On the Brink" doesn't necessarily cover in detail all the policies and activities of the Reagan administration (like Lebanon or Iran-Contra...read Lou Cannon's "Reagan" for this) but those it does cover, it does so in "delicious/readable" prose. Highly recommended!
Good Book - But *one* man didn't do it.......2000-12-08
This was a very good book. The pace and detail kept me glued. I was surprised, however, at how little Reagan is mentioned in the book, given the subtitle. One of the other customer reviewers had it wrong, it was not *one* man (Reagan) who ended the cold war. Rather it was a collection of men and women, and this book brings you their stories (with particular emphasis on Richard Perle).
These were historic times, and while the biased official reviewer is correct in stating that few pages are given to the internal failings of the eastern bloc, to suggest that the hard-line stance of the Reagan administration wasn't the primary instrument of the Cold War victory is ludicrous. It was the Reagan administration after all who seized on the USSR's problems and pushed them over the brink.
Should be a School Textbook--but probably won't!.......1999-10-04
This is a wonderful, to-the-point saga of the years that changed history! It should be a textbook--and the only reason it WON'T be is that it crosses too many agendas!
BTW--why is this book out of print?
Winik digs deep and Bravo; THIS is how Reagan did it........1996-12-21
"On the Brink" should be on display in the Smithsonian.
This book is a National Treasure that will inform people
for generations to come on how one man with inestimable
integrity; conviction to principle; and unwavering backbone,
changed the world and did the impossible: Toppled Communism
in eight short years, and launched Freedom and Liberty on a
virtueous crusade around the globe.
It's all in "On the Brink". This book is a MUST. Winik's
years of tireless research has rewarded us with a timeless
gem that will go down as one of the best political books
of all time.
David Monks
E-Mail: monksd@nabisco.com
Winik digs deep and Bravo; THIS is how Reagan did it........1996-12-21
"On the Brink" should be on display in the Smithsonian.
This book is a National Treasure that will inform people
for generations to come on how one man with inestimable
integrity; conviction to principle; and unwavering backbone,
changed the world and did the impossible: Toppled Communism
in eight short years, and launched Freedom and Liberty on a
virtueous crusade around the globe.
It's all in "On the Brink". This book is a MUST. Winik's
years of tireless research has rewarded us with a timeless
gem that will go down as one of the best political books
of all time.
David Monks
E-Mail: monksd@nabisco.com
Book Description
Written by a diverse group of scholars who bring their regional expertise together, this unique and comprehensive text uses organization as a key tool to help students appreciate this important period in global history. Its clear prose weaves basic factual information and analysis to create a ‘student-friendly' text while still allowing for professors' personal interpretation. An introductory chapter introduces five key topics or themes whose influence on the various developments and events in the twentieth century are chronologically discussed throughout the text. More analysis, less detail and refined prose combine with new and retained features to make the 6th edition of 'The Twentieth Century: A Brief Global History' a best selling text for the 20th Century World course.
Customer Reviews:
Good book.......2006-11-23
I bought this book for a college course and ended up reading almost all of it. It presents the subject matter very well and is well-written. I don't even really like History all that much and this book had me reading it.
Average customer rating:
|
From Slavery to Freedom with Study Guide
John Hope Franklin ,
Alfred A. Moss Jr. ,
John Hope Franklin , and
Alfred Moss
Manufacturer: McGraw-Hill Humanities/Social Sciences/Languages
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
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The eighth edition of this best selling text has been thoroughly revised to include expanded material on the slave resistance, the recent history of African Americans in the United States, more on the history of women, and popular culture. The text has also been redesigned with new charts, maps, photographs, paintings, illustrations, and color inserts and an extensive package has been assembled, using technology and other multimedia to bring history to life. Written by distinguished and award-winning authors, retaining the same features that have made it the most popular text on African American History ever, and with fresh and appealing new features, From Slavery to Freedom remains the most revered, respected, honored text on the market.
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- Oracle Bones: A Journey Between China's Past and Present
- Origin of Wealth: Evolution, Complexity, and the Radical Remaking of Economics
- Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World
- Pigeon Has Feelings, Too!, The
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