A Low, Dishonest Decade

How We Got Here: The 70’s: The Decade That Brought You Modern Life (For Better or Worse), by David Frum (Basic Books, 481 pp., $25)

In his introduction to Eminent Victorians, Lytton Strachey opines that, “if he is wise,” any chronicler of recent events “will attack his subject in unexpected places; he will fall upon the flank, or the rear, he will shoot a sudden, revealing searchlight into obscure recesses, hitherto undivined. He will row out over the great ocean of material, and lower down into it, here and there, a little bucket, which will bring up to the light of day some characteristic specimen, from those far depths, to be examined with a careful curiosity.”

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John Podhoretz

John Podhoretz is the editor of Commentary.

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How We Got Here: The 70’s: The Decade That Brought You Modern Life (For Better or Worse), by David Frum (Basic Books, 481 pp., $25)

In his introduction to Eminent Victorians, Lytton Strachey opines that, “if he is wise,” any chronicler of recent events “will attack his subject in unexpected places; he will fall upon the flank, or the rear, he will shoot a sudden, revealing searchlight into obscure recesses, hitherto undivined. He will row out over the great ocean of material, and lower down into it, here and there, a little bucket, which will bring up to the light of day some characteristic specimen, from those far depths, to be examined with a careful curiosity.”