Philosopher at Large: An Intellectual Autobiography, by Mortimer J. Adler (Macmillan, 329 pp., $12.95). Dr. Adler is a very confused man, and the face he has wound up with shows that there is some justice in this world. The eyes are fine; serious; human. But the rest of the face is all an unpleasant softness; it is a commercial, not an intellectual face; and this account of his life explains why. The books that Dr. Adler liked and which left him so confused, though so human, serious, and highly commercial, became part of the standard backdrop of American education, and helped to change everything. Almost a million sets of them have been sold since 1952; countless Americans picked up the general, confused esteem for The Intellect which inspired his choices; businessmen in some strange manner were recruited to the cause of Modern Art, and when Aquinas was suddenly packaged and sold as one of the fifty great minds of the West, American Catholic colleges began to slip away from him, toward the other 49. Later Adler devoted his energies to producing an inferior version of the Encyclopedia Britannica, published in 1974. A man who has done so much to shape the popular idea of intelligent reading inevitably, when he writes his memoirs, throws some light on the world he helped to make; but this volume may leave a very unfavorable impression on those who have found out “how to read a book.” Adler admires deep, humane, fundamental principles of belief and action, but he does not have any. He likes them even better if they demand moral earnestness, but he has very little of that. He is a salesman. farley Clinton
The Game They Played, by Stanley Cohen (Farrar, 246 pp., $8.95). The college basketball scandal of the early 1950s was a shattering experience to those for whom the game seemed less a sport than a secular religion. Twenty gifted athletes were indicted for their role in fixing games for professional gamblers. Intercollegiate hardwood competition was sullied by the seedy revelations, and countless youngsters were scarred by the sight of their heroes suddenly reduced to figures of scorn and then banished from the game. The author and I still carry those scars. Cohen’s catharsis is worked out through this searing study of the painful days when his boyhood idol, Ed Roman, and the CCNY grand slam champions were convicted; the city game would never be the same again. The book is a stylist’s delight: its writing crackles with the authenticity that only a true believer could offer to those who share his faith. One could almost forgive Cohen’s occasional flaws of innuendo, dime-store political inference, and philosophical overkill. Almost, that is, until he indulges in churlish parochialism and claims the tragedy as a personal affront. This reviewer recalls the halcyon days of an Indianapolis childhood spent in devotion to Ralph Beard and the fabled Olympians. And then they were gone—along with many of my illusions. Even by “provincial” Midwestern standards, Stan, the price was high.
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