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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
SDS, by Kirkpatrick Sale. New York: Random House. 752 pp. 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 …
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 …
Falling into decades—it is a modest version of the archaic practice in European elementary schools of dividing great epochs into convenient categories: the Middle Ages came to an end and then began the Renaissance. In reality, history moves in uneven …
“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,” …
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 …
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 …
What was Stephen Spender to the students and what were they to him in 1968, “the year of the young rebels”? They, the engage and the enrages, were seeking to restructure the university and radicalize the society (Columbia, the Sorbonne), to …
An intellectual’s lot is not a happy one —at least if the setting is the White House, the President Lyndon B. Johnson, and the man of ideas Eric Goldman, on leave from Princeton to serve as Special Consultant to the President …
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 …
In that best and worst of times for the South, the decade from 1955 to 1965, a remarkable drama unfolded. The best came out of “The Movement,” the loose coalition of civil-rights groups. The Movement’s young people, black and white, …
