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Intellectual Skywriting By Philip Nobile Charterhouse, 312 pp., $7.95 In these days when gods lose their savor and priestly castes are made of mere sociologists and litterateurs, no wonder our celebrated literary feuds breathe an air of odium theologicum. What indeed, since angels no longer dance on pinheads, could surpass in cosmic moment what Chomsky responded to what Wrong wrote about Izzy’s view of what Fairbank said about Lyndon’s war with Ho?

Strangely, such supreme issues were stirred by the mild craft of book reviewing, or rather the sort of reviewing that The New York Review of Books did in its first decade. “Before NYR showed its stuff,” says Mr. Nobile, “the reviewing business was a gentlemanly affair carried on with charity toward all and malice toward none, or almost none.”

EY

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Edwin M. Yoder Jr.

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Intellectual Skywriting By Philip Nobile Charterhouse, 312 pp., $7.95 In these days when gods lose their savor and priestly castes are made of mere sociologists and litterateurs, no wonder our celebrated literary feuds breathe an air of odium theologicum. What indeed, since angels no longer dance on pinheads, could surpass in cosmic moment what Chomsky responded to what Wrong wrote about Izzy’s view of what Fairbank said about Lyndon’s war with Ho?

Strangely, such supreme issues were stirred by the mild craft of book reviewing, or rather the sort of reviewing that The New York Review of Books did in its first decade. “Before NYR showed its stuff,” says Mr. Nobile, “the reviewing business was a gentlemanly affair carried on with charity toward all and malice toward none, or almost none.”