Vox Clamantis

After Reason By Arianna Stassinopoulos Stein and Day, 240 pp., $10 Arianna Stassinopoulos is the most cocksure and charismatic conservative to burst upon our decorous little men’s club since, some fifty years ago, Clare Boothe Luce made her debut at Vanity Fair. Still in her twenties, Miss Stassinopoulos has already preened herself as the first woman president of the Cambridge Union, issued a crushing critique of women’s liberation (The Female Woman), emerged as an important figure on British television, composed a short history of Greece, and now written—“through all the hours of the night” and to the music of Haydn’s 104 symphonies and “some of the more clamorous passages of Verdi”—a dense and dithyrambic tract on what she rather callowly calls “the total exhaustion of the spiritual substance of Western society.” She is at the moment finishing up a biography of Maria Callas, a figure of comparably operatic inspiration, though less apparent charm.

All this has long seemed rather rich to certain more thin-blooded Englishmen, and her new book, After Reason, left the reviewer for the British Spectator in a condition of nearly apoplectic spite. The truth is, though, that despite her unwillingness to turn off the more clamorous Verdi, she has written a powerful and true polemic. Though it is marred by a certain disorganization and consequent redundancy, the book is full of interesting observations made in vigorous and resourceful language, supported by a wide frame of reference and quotation, and uncompromised by any deference to prevailing ideas.

About the Author

George Gilder

Mr. Gilder is a founder of the Discovery Institute, a venture capitalist, and the author of 15 books, including The Israel Test.

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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

After Reason By Arianna Stassinopoulos Stein and Day, 240 pp., $10 Arianna Stassinopoulos is the most cocksure and charismatic conservative to burst upon our decorous little men’s club since, some fifty years ago, Clare Boothe Luce made her debut at Vanity Fair. Still in her twenties, Miss Stassinopoulos has already preened herself as the first woman president of the Cambridge Union, issued a crushing critique of women’s liberation (The Female Woman), emerged as an important figure on British television, composed a short history of Greece, and now written—“through all the hours of the night” and to the music of Haydn’s 104 symphonies and “some of the more clamorous passages of Verdi”—a dense and dithyrambic tract on what she rather callowly calls “the total exhaustion of the spiritual substance of Western society.” She is at the moment finishing up a biography of Maria Callas, a figure of comparably operatic inspiration, though less apparent charm.

All this has long seemed rather rich to certain more thin-blooded Englishmen, and her new book, After Reason, left the reviewer for the British Spectator in a condition of nearly apoplectic spite. The truth is, though, that despite her unwillingness to turn off the more clamorous Verdi, she has written a powerful and true polemic. Though it is marred by a certain disorganization and consequent redundancy, the book is full of interesting observations made in vigorous and resourceful language, supported by a wide frame of reference and quotation, and uncompromised by any deference to prevailing ideas.