Books, Arts & Manners: Sub Specie Aeternitatis

A Better World: The Great Schism— Stalinism and the American Intellectuals By William L. O’Neill Simon & Schuster, 447 pp., $17.95

First the good news: Professor O’Neill has examined the record of the struggle between pro- and anti-Stalinist intellectuals since the eve of World War II and discovered that we of the anti-Stalinist persuasion did not provoke Stalin to seize Eastern Europe, organize the Prague coup in 1948, or blockade Berlin. Nor, revisionist historians to the contrary notwithstanding, did we put the “Hollywood Ten” in the laundry, whoop it up for the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and provide Joe McCarthy with his raison d’être.

A Better World: The Great Schism— Stalinism and the American Intellectuals By William L. O’Neill Simon & Schuster, 447 pp., $17.95

First the good news: Professor O’Neill has examined the record of the struggle between pro- and anti-Stalinist intellectuals since the eve of World War II and discovered that we of the anti-Stalinist persuasion did not provoke Stalin to seize Eastern Europe, organize the Prague coup in 1948, or blockade Berlin. Nor, revisionist historians to the contrary notwithstanding, did we put the “Hollywood Ten” in the laundry, whoop it up for the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and provide Joe McCarthy with his raison d’être.