Review of Herbert Feis’s cold war study (title not captured in dump)

either by European journalists or by intellectual opportunists in the American academy. The incompetence of the latter in reconstructing history is often a result of choice as well as of character—a curious, yet predictable, combination of intellectual malady that has, as yet, escaped the pathogenetic analysis of twentieth-century intellectual life.

Herbert Feis was very well equipped to write a reliable history of 1945-1950, if need be from the vantage points of Washington and of New York. But what he produced is a jagged and journalistic account, with chopped-up paragraphs and subchapters, jumping from place to place and from continent to continent. While he was not a master of high style, in his earlier books Feis could produce a competent and clear kind of English that could be (alas, it is not) emulated with profit by many younger historians. But now:

JL

About the Author

John Lukacs

either by European journalists or by intellectual opportunists in the American academy. The incompetence of the latter in reconstructing history is often a result of choice as well as of character—a curious, yet predictable, combination of intellectual malady that has, as yet, escaped the pathogenetic analysis of twentieth-century intellectual life.

Herbert Feis was very well equipped to write a reliable history of 1945-1950, if need be from the vantage points of Washington and of New York. But what he produced is a jagged and journalistic account, with chopped-up paragraphs and subchapters, jumping from place to place and from continent to continent. While he was not a master of high style, in his earlier books Feis could produce a competent and clear kind of English that could be (alas, it is not) emulated with profit by many younger historians. But now: