Reviewed in Brief

Mr. Viereck has enthusiasm, energy, self-confidence, any number of tidy quotations, and they are all at the service of his “new hero for Americans”—the square peg in the round hole who refuses to suffer for it any longer, who, in fact, is already promoting himself as a prototype with a very distinctive if minority appeal. (What we should all do now: be different!) One does not entirely disagree with Mr. Viereck at first, but the more one muses through this miscellanea of articles and reviews the more one wonders why not. For this overly sure, officious voice is not that of a witness, but a spokesman. If this is the way an “unadjusted man” sounds, then how does a “booster” sound? Mr. Viereck is still the exuberant president of a junior Chamber of Commerce; he has just moved from suburbia to a sort of collegiate bohemia. On the other hand, what is more useful than a bumptious man with whom you sometimes agree? Doesn’t he make you question yourself far more scrupulously than a mere enemy?

An anthology (meant to amuse) of “entertaining writing about—God bless ‘em—women”; mostly by American men, about American women; and inevitably ironic since, in truth, very few American males have any un-ironic idea of what they really think about woman, especially in her current (say, post-suffrage) masochistic stage of disenchantment. It is this coy, unmanly tone of “God bless ‘em—women” which makes most Europeans, and all the rest of the world’s races, regard the American male as invariably immature, basically autoerotic, and as femalefearing as a cub Scout. One would like to add, very un-ironically, that one has known a few women who seem to deserve the name, and they all had this virtue in common: They neither imitated, nor envied, nor bullied, nor castrated the men in their lives; very efficiently, very decisively and very inconspicuously, they created them.

RP

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Robert Phelps

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Mr. Viereck has enthusiasm, energy, self-confidence, any number of tidy quotations, and they are all at the service of his “new hero for Americans”—the square peg in the round hole who refuses to suffer for it any longer, who, in fact, is already promoting himself as a prototype with a very distinctive if minority appeal. (What we should all do now: be different!) One does not entirely disagree with Mr. Viereck at first, but the more one muses through this miscellanea of articles and reviews the more one wonders why not. For this overly sure, officious voice is not that of a witness, but a spokesman. If this is the way an “unadjusted man” sounds, then how does a “booster” sound? Mr. Viereck is still the exuberant president of a junior Chamber of Commerce; he has just moved from suburbia to a sort of collegiate bohemia. On the other hand, what is more useful than a bumptious man with whom you sometimes agree? Doesn’t he make you question yourself far more scrupulously than a mere enemy?

An anthology (meant to amuse) of “entertaining writing about—God bless ‘em—women”; mostly by American men, about American women; and inevitably ironic since, in truth, very few American males have any un-ironic idea of what they really think about woman, especially in her current (say, post-suffrage) masochistic stage of disenchantment. It is this coy, unmanly tone of “God bless ‘em—women” which makes most Europeans, and all the rest of the world’s races, regard the American male as invariably immature, basically autoerotic, and as femalefearing as a cub Scout. One would like to add, very un-ironically, that one has known a few women who seem to deserve the name, and they all had this virtue in common: They neither imitated, nor envied, nor bullied, nor castrated the men in their lives; very efficiently, very decisively and very inconspicuously, they created them.