The Strength of Memory  

WRITE a long, flowing political novel about a small group of Old Left, Anti-Stalinist socialists, tracing their paths from a youthful idealism in the late thirties to a weariness in the early sixties. Weave together their tangled personal lives and …



American Jitters  

The Dying of the Light, by Arnold A. Rogow. New York: G.B. Putnam’s Sons. 384 pp. America is bleak house. Arnold Rogow, a political scientist whose work has always transcended traditional academic divisions of labor and who combines the perspectives …



Custom of the Country  

Divorced in America, by Joseph Epstein. New York: E. P. Dutton. 318 pp. Divorce, middle-class American style in particular, is endlessly discussed and little understood. The divorce rate continues to rise (the remarriage rate as well); the statistics no longer …



A Writer’s Progress  

From the Diary of a Snail, by Gunter Grass. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 310 pp. In some sense, all writers and artists are politically engaged; they have to protect the integrity of their work from the heavy hand of …



Remembrance of Things Past  

The rise, fall, and further fall of Students for a Democratic Society during the sixties is more than another melancholy footnote to the failed radical movements in America. While it lasted, as the centerpiece of the New Left in the …





No Single Road  

The Illusion of Equality, by Murray Milner, Jr. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. 172 pp. Sociologists frequently challenge the conventional wisdom not because they are perverse but because they must pay heed whenever their data do not square with prevailing ideas. So …





Can Life Become Better?  

“Loss of identity” and “quest for community”—these phrases, nearly worn out from overuse by pop-intellectuals, are rescued and restored to life by Richard Sennett in this thoughtful, seminal little book about the urban condition in America. “Condition” rather than “crisis,” …



Vivid Pictures of Bad Old Days  

The Great Depression, b. 1929, d. 1939 (?)—you have to think about those hard times in a context of chronology and generations. For anyone 45 and over the Depression happened too recently; the memory is still painful, we can still …



Up Against the Statler-Hilton Wall  

The demand for deeper change in American society is an encouraging sign. Liberals, affirming their faith in the country, concede “the system” remains obdurate and search for policies beyond the New Deal. New Leftists, despairing of “the system,” may yet …







The U.S. as a Model  

Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber belongs to that small but influential group on the democratic Left in France which regards technological innovation as a key to a more progressive social order in Europe. These men pride themselves on their pragmatism, their lack of dogma …