Books, Arts & Manners: Processed History

A Struggle for Power: The American Revolution, by Theodore Draper (Times, 524 pp., $32.50)

AMONG the casualties of the computer age, perhaps the most disturbing is the decline of clarity in the use of the English language by people in what Dick Armey calls the talking trades. I am not thinking only of politicians, who long ago learned the utility of speaking in forked tongues, or the likes of bureaucrats and sociologists, who develop jargons to disguise their lack of anything to say. Rather, I have in mind historians, journalists, novelists, teachers, and other people to whom clarity of expression ought to be crucial but who increasingly have lost contact with what they are saying.

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Forrest McDonald

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A Struggle for Power: The American Revolution, by Theodore Draper (Times, 524 pp., $32.50)

AMONG the casualties of the computer age, perhaps the most disturbing is the decline of clarity in the use of the English language by people in what Dick Armey calls the talking trades. I am not thinking only of politicians, who long ago learned the utility of speaking in forked tongues, or the likes of bureaucrats and sociologists, who develop jargons to disguise their lack of anything to say. Rather, I have in mind historians, journalists, novelists, teachers, and other people to whom clarity of expression ought to be crucial but who increasingly have lost contact with what they are saying.