In his latest film, Weekend, Jean-Luc Godard attacks the phenomenon of violence. He piles horror on horror—adds gore, callousness, perversion, brutality, all culminating in cannibalism. Not since Hieronymus Bosch and Goya have we been exposed to such ghastly pictorial visions. …
Czeslaw Milosz belongs to the small group of contemporary writers who have “looked into the abyss” and survived the experience, scarred but without having lost their integrity as writers and human beings. His book The Captive Mind established him some …
As a film-maker, Jean-Luc Godard has been uniquely associated with the sensibility of the young; he has given it models to live by and images of at least partial self-approval. From his first and perhaps still his best picture, Breathless, …
What, yet more books on the concentration camps? Who wants to read them—to stir up painful memories, to unbury the dead? But are we so sure we have learned the lessons of the camps, that key phenomenon of the mid-twentieth …
There has been no dearth of commentaries on the Vietnam War and on the crisis into which it has plunged this country. The very proliferation of writings is a measure of the depth of this crisis: no comparable output accompanied, …
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote New York: Random House 343 pp. $5.95. Truman Capote’s meticulous story of a quadruple murder on the Kansas plain, its instant success, and some of the critical reactions to it raise a number of …
Truman Capote’s meticulous story of a quadruple murder on the Kansas plain, its instant success, and some of the critical reactions to it raise a number of thoughts and questions. To take the success first, can it primarily be attributed …
MILLS VS. HOWE Editors: Commenting on C. W. Mills’ “Causes of World War III” in the Spring DisSENT, Irving Howe charges Mills with “a relentless thrust of assertion” and “analytic carelessness and moral disequilibrium.” It seems to me that in …
A new type of political leader has developed in the last few decades. He is a figure both fascinating and ominous, at times attractive for his raw vigor and at other times frightening in his distance from modern assumptions. We …
In his review of Milovan Djilas’ New Class, [DISSENT, Fall 1957] Norman Thomas necessarily had to stress the general and very powerful job of debunking which this book has performed. But there is one problem touched upon by Djilas which …
