The Twilight of the Intellectuals: Culture and Politics in the Era of the Cold War

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.

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Didn't Live Up

I never wanted it to end!! Fabulous!

An all-star cast of my generation! I swooned over Rod Taylor and Robert Culp!

WONDERFUL cast, beautifully performed, an EXCITING thrilling journey you won't forget!

"Hard Rock Lovers".....Beautifully done!!

Hard Rock Lovers
Paul Kyriazi
Manufacturer: Ronin Audio Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Audio CD

General | Star Trek | Media | Science Fiction & Fantasy | Subjects | Books
ASIN: 0971618321

Product Description

Computer programmer Alan Bartlet takes his new girlfriend to Las Vegas. There he meets Medusa, a backup singer for the now dead rock star Shane. She hints that Shane might be alive. In flashback, we see the rise and fall of Shane. Alan pursues Medusa and descends into a world of mystery, lust and murder to find out: Is Shane Alive?

Customer Reviews:

Didn't Live Up.......2007-07-03

I absolutely love "The James Bond Lifestyle Seminar," but this audiobook fell short. The plot was decent, but nothing better than you'd expect based on the synopsis. The main character is supposed to be 33 years old, yet his voice sounds like an old man. He sounds very unsure of himself. Also, a lot more could have been done with the sound effects. They did not immerse me in the scenes, as another reviewer claimed.

I never wanted it to end!! Fabulous!.......2007-01-16

Mr Kyriazi's production of Hard Rock Lovers was just fantastic! I was on the edge of my seat on a daily basis! I put the audio book on my iPod and listened while I jogged. I gotta say it motivated me to get out there and I am so sad it is over! I cannot wait for his next Audio production!

The story is fantastic, gripping and sexy. I absolutely loved it!

Bravo!!!!

An all-star cast of my generation! I swooned over Rod Taylor and Robert Culp!.......2006-05-22

Wow! My sister pointed me to this audio book and I couldn't believe my ears. I just relaxed on my bed to listen and was absolutely delighted with the movie-quality of the sound effects. Not only is this a masterful, well-written plot, it's also a quality production. The best I've heard.

And those stars that the magnificent author/director Paul Kyriazi lined up for this special version of his book!!! Well, all I can say is that I remember swooning each time I saw any of them on the big screen. (I hope my hubby doesn't read this.) But when I saw Rod Taylor--who narrates this story, with such a come-hither voice--starring in The Birds with that gorgeous Tippi Hedren, I almost fainted. Yes, he was that much of a hunk ... and still is, according to my sister!

Incidentally, people used to say I looked like Tippi. Ah-hhh, memories ... But getting back to this audio book, I loved it to pieces.

Keep up the excellent work, Mr. K. You're terrific, and almost as handsome as the great Rod! Ciao, baby ...

WONDERFUL cast, beautifully performed, an EXCITING thrilling journey you won't forget!.......2006-03-15

From the moment Hard Rock Lovers comes on ... it takes you by the hand and mind, and immediately draws you into this intriquing story, narrated by the imcomparable Rod Taylor, of revenge, love, lust, cold reality and spiritual enlightenment.

Robert Culp kept me laughing with his perfect low-life agent performance, always the best! James Darren was the perfect rock star, mean, talented but sad, his performance was # 1. Ishtar Uhvana was great as Medusa, she added the sweetness to keep some reality in the rock world and her ending dialoque brought tears to my eyes. Loved Russ Tamblyn, George Chakiris was brilliant as the evil Reynaldo, and Nefta Perry as Connie played the perfect Rosie Perez.

The ending gives you hope and leaves you with happy feelings. You will want to play it again and again; it only gets better each time you listen.

Paul Kyriazi is my hero. I am his BIGGEST fan.

Thank you Paul for the fun and exciting adventure!

"Hard Rock Lovers".....Beautifully done!!.......2006-03-14

The "Hard Rock Lovers" audio book was not at all what I expected, but what a wonderful surprise! It's a twisted, tangled web of events played out by a handful of multi-leveled, intertwined characters. The story is well written, beautifully told and convincingly enacted centering on the heights of a successful rock star and the terrible costs that are paid when that success is abused. People and events are manipulated by all the characters to satisfy their own needs and agenda.

"Good" and "evil" are blurred. "Life" and "death" are blurred. Relationships are blurred, but the irony of fate is boldly presented and it's made abundantly clear that our "next" existence offers another chance to hopefully do better. The inevitability of change, the subtle and sometimes dramatic interrelationships between cause and effect as well as the ever-present, ever-looming scales of divine and poetic justice are persistent threads. A beautiful blending of drama and melodrama are used to develop both the story and the characters. The audio presentation is top-notch entertainment, particularly when you consider that all acting is accomplished solely through vocal artistry. The actors do a fantastic job of inviting the listener into their world and moving you effortlessly through the story.

I really enjoyed listening to this audio book. It is wonderful from start to finish and my congratulations go out to all involved. It's a winner on all levels.

The Last Cowboy: Twilight Era of the Horseback Cowhand, 1900-1940

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The Last Cowboy: Twilight Era of the Horseback Cowhand, 1900-1940
Jo Rainbolt
Manufacturer: Two Bears Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Theory of Twilight (Modern & Contemporary Poetry of the American West)

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Theory of Twilight (Modern & Contemporary Poetry of the American West)
Gary Short
Manufacturer: Ahsahta Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Flying over Sonny Liston: Poems (Western Literature Series)

ASIN: 0916272583

Book Description

In his collection Theory of Twilight, Gary Short finds a quiet spirituality in everyday experiences, childhood memories, and natural occurrences. In poems that range in inspiration from a meditation by Basho to the stark landscapes and highways of Nevada, readers travel with Short down a highway where one encounters a schoolyard of students exercising ("scissoring into an X/ then closing to an I") or brothers playing catch with a football ("the space between us/ filling with darkness"); where the receding glow of red taillights evokes the memory of a father smoking cigarettes in the dark, waiting for his son to come home. In the book's title poem "Theory of Twilight," a narrative of how a family comes together at the death of the speaker's brother, Short's description of the casketed body is plain-spoken and moving: "His father had touched his eyes closed, mothered / the shock of black hair from his forehead / and made into prayer, finger by finger / the hands."

Twilight Innings: A West Texan on Grace And Survival

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Twilight Innings: A West Texan on Grace And Survival
Robert Adon Fink
Manufacturer: Texas Tech University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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Tracking the Morning

ASIN: 0896725847

Book Description

"Twilight Innings is packed with sometimes painful, sometimes funny, but always insightfully drawn experiences that come from everyday life. Fink's essays have a beginning, middle, and an end. They have characters. They are stories that take you into the corners of his personal world, and it's a trip worth making. "—Ken Hammond

"In these essays Fink puts himself in the middle of the diamond as in the middle of things American, and readers are grateful to be witnesses to the informed heart, the discriminate sympathy, the keen yet modest intelligence, the deftness of his prose strokes."—Bruce Smith

"In the interstices of silence, a spoken word is—paradoxically—dangerously inappropriate and yet desperately desired. Any word uttered must be sure, apt, and, above all, honest. Bob Fink speaks into the void with just such infallible assurance and disarming candor."—Steve Weathers

"[I am] not really surprised at all to learn that Bob, who has always made good, if occasionally oblique, use of his life experiences in his poems, has done so even more directly in a companionable genre. Those who admire his poems, as I and many others do, will be pleased to learn more here about the man (and about the woman who stands behind, beside, and sometimes in front of him)."—R. S. Gwynn, from the Foreword

Previously published in the Cortland Review, Concho River Review, the Iowa Review, the Mississippi Review, River Teeth, the Texas Review, Texas Magazine, and other journals, Robert A. Fink's essays—joyful, sorrowful, nostalgic, gently sardonic—are collected here for the first time. With a poet's sensibility, Fink explores his memories of Vietnam; the satisfaction he finds in running; the beauty, order, and grace of baseball; and the necessity of laughter, and of laughing at ourselves.

RIDERS OF THE TWILIGHT TRAIL, A NOVEL OF THE OLD WEST
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RIDERS OF THE TWILIGHT TRAIL, A NOVEL OF THE OLD WEST

Manufacturer: Exposition Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000I9LGU6

The Twilight of the Sioux (Volume II of A Cycle of the West) (Neihardt, John Gneisenau, Cycle of the West, V. 2.)
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Superb Technique

Outstanding poetic review of the white race's journey west.

The Twilight of the Sioux (Volume II of A Cycle of the West) (Neihardt, John Gneisenau, Cycle of the West, V. 2.)
John G. Neihardt
Manufacturer: University of Nebraska Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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A Cycle of the West: The Song of Three Friends, The Song of Hugh Glass, The Song of Jed Smith, The Song of the Indian Wars, The Song of the Messiah

Black Elk Speaks

ASIN: 0803257341

Book Description

The second volume of A Cycle of the West, dealing with the tragic defeat of the Plains Indians, includes The Song of the Indian Wars (1925) and The Song of the Messiah (1935). The former tells of "the period of migration and the last great fight for the bison pastures between the invading white race and the Sioux, the Cheyenne, and the Arapahoe," while the latter concerns "the conquered people and the worldly end of the last great dream." It closes with the battle of Wounded Knee, ending Indian resistance on the Plains.

Customer Reviews:

Superb Technique.......2005-02-08

I had the good fortune to meet Dr. Neihardt when I was 15. We had been discussing poetry in my high school literature class, focusing on meaning in the poetry we read. I asked Dr. Neihardt what he considered the most important thing in writing poetry, expecting to hear something about philosophy or emotion or, at least, meaning. "Technique," he answered. As I look at his work I can see what he meant. His magnum opus, A Cycle of the West, is an example of the finest of the writing art. In keeping with his view that poetry is a vocal art and with his background of absorbing Homer in the Greek and Virgil in the Latin as a kid, he titles the five divisions of the work as songs: The Song of Three Friends, The Song of Hugh Glass, The song of Jed Smith, The Song of the Indian Wars, and The Song of the Messiah. Dr. Neihardt adopted a rule to apply throughout his work: the entire work would be in iambic pentameter with rhymed couplets. The entire work, properly termed an epic poem, required faithful daily application for thirty years of his life. On some of those days he could progress only five lines. He described to me how he often had to revise whole hard-won sections he thought he had gotten to be good but on the next day's review, weren't. One should not forget the difficult research Neihardt had to do, too. Travel in the early 1900s was very difficult, and Neihardt covered thousands of miles to get his material for the Cycle. All the advice one reads from Strunk and White, Barzun, and others is reflected in every sentence of the Cycle. Every word does all the work that can be gotten out of it. The reader is placed on scene in every sentence. Scene, description, and summary are subtly blended everywhere. The passage of time is also smoothly handled. Neihardt achieved mood through technique. He would often select dark and bright words as needed. He used every rhetorical tool. One will not find inert material anywhere, either. The extremely few adverbs and adjectives Neihardt allowed into his work are indispensable, and each one is there to take the place of many words. Beyond this, though, the Cycle fulfills its job of allowing for a captivating, smoothly flowing recital aloud. The reader will stumble on no clumsy wording. An example from the end of his Song of the Indian Wars, where Crazy Horse is taken off to be buried by his parents: "And when the morning heard the meadowlark/ The last great Sioux rode silently away./ Before the pony drag on which he lay/ An old man tottered. Bowed above the bier,/A little wrinkled woman kept the rear/ With not a sound and nothing in her eyes./ (white space) Who knows the crumbling summit where he lies/ Alone among the badlands? Kiotes prowl/ About it, and the voices of the owl/ Assume the day-long sorrow of the crows,/ These many grasses and these many snows." Powerful stuff! It's all that good. Little wonder it was selected for inclusion in The Best Books of the World from Homer to Hemingway.

Outstanding poetic review of the white race's journey west........1998-10-27

A true mystic's view, inspired by his subconscious, this rhymed couplet volume of five songs shows the process of the take over of the Native American lands. This recital of the facts and details of the westward expansion focuses on five distinct times, commencing with the Ashley-Henry expedition and culminating with the Native American "Ghost Dancers" attempt to return their lands to the people as a whole, rather than to individuals or companies.

Neihardt neither praises nor condemns the expansion itself but shows how it occurred, warts and all. While sympathetic to the Native American cause, Neihardt judges neither the white man nor the Plains folk.

Neihardt praises the beauty of the human form, spirit and tenacity. He sees the beauty underneath the blemishes that are all too obvious. He shows the power of perseverence in his song of Hugh Glass. He shows the love and jealousy of two men in the shooting of the cup. He shows the Native American subjugation through religion as no other writer could.

His simple rhyming couplets that extend for five full length books, reveal the mystical relationship Neihardt had not only with Native Americans but also with the Earth and all of her denizens.

From his early days as a Kansas farm boy to his later years as a professor of literature, Neihardt has sustained this objective but sympathetic view from the Native American's eyes.

Only John Gneisenau Neihardt could hear the songs from the Wind, the Earth, the Moon, the Sun, the Spirits of the Fathers and Grandfathers that went before and then place them on paper, for those who cared to listen, to hear them.

Book Description

"It would have been inconceivable," wrote Henry Kissinger in his best-selling book Diplomacy, "that the architects of NATO would have seen as the end result of victory in the Cold War greater diversity within the Alliance." In Twilight of the West, Christopher Coker offers an interpretation of why the Western Alliance is in serious trouble and why it may have entered the twilight of its collective life. Throughout, Coker draws on a wide-ranging discussion of Western culture to understand the changes that are taking place in the Western world. Particular emphasis is placed on the changes in philosophy that helped shape the Alliance and its view of the rest of the world.

Twilight Texas: The West Texans (Harlequin Superromance No. 820)

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Ho Hum

Twilight Texas: The West Texans (Harlequin Superromance No. 820)
Ginger Chambers
Manufacturer: Harlequin
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0373708203

Customer Reviews:

Ho Hum.......1999-05-15

I looked forward to reading this book. I've never read any of Ms. Chambers' work before. In reading the blurb on the back cover, this book sounded like a great "western" tale, Lee Parker "of the Parker Ranch", and Karen Latham the niece of an antique shop owner in the small town of Twilight. Karen inherits the antique shop upon her aunt's passing and returns to the town. It seems that she spent many happy summers there with her aunt.

Her connection to the Parker family (who by the way ranches near the area, but doesn't frequent the town) was that seven years ago she was jilted literally at the altar by Alex, the younger Parker brother. Lee, who was to serve as best man, has always had Karen in the back of his mind, these past years. Lee doesn't even live on the ranch, but rather is a producer of sorts for some kind of Americana travelogue.

So for seven years she carries around this venomous hatred of all things Parker. The main plot of this story seems to focus on some implausible premise of a big movie production company using the little near-deserted town for a press premiere of their latest movie. There is more writing devoted to this than the actual relationship (such as it is) between the two main characters. Lee is in town to film a story about the premiere for his tv travel series. In the midst of her trip to Twilight, she has a serious suitor 'back home' who is pressuring her to marry him. It almost seems as if her attitude is to keep him around until something better comes along.

For the first 100 pages or so, the heroine doesn't even talk to the hero, other than to spew invective when she couldn't avoid him altogether. There is a brief kiss exchanged in the 120 page range, then back to the droning saga of the movie people. Then suddenly near the 200 page mark, Lee's great aunt Mae appears and has a brief conversation with Karen, and everything is (unbelievably) fine. All these bad feelings she'd harboured are negated overnight and she makes a 180 degree change in her attitude. All without any interaction at all with the hero.

Of course there's a big misunderstanding, and she's back to hating the Parkers. This see-sawing almost drove me nuts to read it. There is some controversy about a legend regarding the town and Lee's team uncovers it. The movie people were interested in the town based on the existence of this legend as historical fact. For many more pages than I care to count, this was the plot and setting.

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