Sifting So Much Sand

Europe in the Twentieth Century By George Lichtheim

Praeger, 409 pp., $12.95 After a desultory discussion of the confused views of Sartre, George Lichtheim asks pettishly (as though God ought not to permit such confusion in a well-run universe), “What is one to make of it all?” It is an old man’s question although not every old man asks it; a question reflecting vanished certainties, lost causes and the growing awareness that the magic of words, even the party-Chinese language of Marxism, will not serve to master a reality that is multiform, complex and wholly unpredictable. In the arid and windy desert landscape in which the fellow travelers of latter-day Communism dwell, the question “what is one to make of it all?” has a particularly poignant and resonant ring.

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Stephen J. Tonsor

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Europe in the Twentieth Century By George Lichtheim

Praeger, 409 pp., $12.95 After a desultory discussion of the confused views of Sartre, George Lichtheim asks pettishly (as though God ought not to permit such confusion in a well-run universe), “What is one to make of it all?” It is an old man’s question although not every old man asks it; a question reflecting vanished certainties, lost causes and the growing awareness that the magic of words, even the party-Chinese language of Marxism, will not serve to master a reality that is multiform, complex and wholly unpredictable. In the arid and windy desert landscape in which the fellow travelers of latter-day Communism dwell, the question “what is one to make of it all?” has a particularly poignant and resonant ring.