Books, Arts & Manners: How Good They Were

Sporting Gentlemen: Men’s Tennis from the Age of Honor to the Cult of the Superstar, by E. Digby Baltzell (Free Press, 398 pp., $30)

WHILE ostensibly writing about tennis, E. Digby Baltzell has in fact taken the occasion to say out loud, without flinching, what the late James Burnham once remarked to me: that, for men in America, the only plausible ideal of conduct is the idea of the Gentleman. What else is there? The Rock Star? The Cowboy? Norman Mailer’s White Negro? The Underground Man? Huck Finn?

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Jeffrey Hart

Jeffrey Hart is a contributor to National Review.

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Sporting Gentlemen: Men’s Tennis from the Age of Honor to the Cult of the Superstar, by E. Digby Baltzell (Free Press, 398 pp., $30)

WHILE ostensibly writing about tennis, E. Digby Baltzell has in fact taken the occasion to say out loud, without flinching, what the late James Burnham once remarked to me: that, for men in America, the only plausible ideal of conduct is the idea of the Gentleman. What else is there? The Rock Star? The Cowboy? Norman Mailer’s White Negro? The Underground Man? Huck Finn?