Reveille at Sundown

Professor Charles Frankel is an honest man, a man of genuine good will. He has a keen, wide-ranging, well-stocked mind, and a style that is always graceful and not infrequently brilliant and witty. He merits a kind of attention that the Liberal movement’s hacks and vested pleaders cannot claim, and merits it the more because this book (The Case for Modern Man, Harper & Brothers, $3.50) is an attempt to “formulate an outlook which . . . expresses the working principles of practical liberalism,” and to re-examine its credentials “by considering the most representative and influential indictments which have been drawn up against it.”

Liberals look out upon today’s world, says Prof. Frankel, with “their imaginations jaundiced and dispirited, doubtful about the fundamental categories in which to view their past, uncertain about the way to implement their hopes for the future, even uncertain about what hopes to have.” And he hopes that his book “can do something to revive that jaundiced imagination, and to restore, in a criticized form, the ideas and ideals which once nourished it.”

JC

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John Abbot Clark

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Professor Charles Frankel is an honest man, a man of genuine good will. He has a keen, wide-ranging, well-stocked mind, and a style that is always graceful and not infrequently brilliant and witty. He merits a kind of attention that the Liberal movement’s hacks and vested pleaders cannot claim, and merits it the more because this book (The Case for Modern Man, Harper & Brothers, $3.50) is an attempt to “formulate an outlook which . . . expresses the working principles of practical liberalism,” and to re-examine its credentials “by considering the most representative and influential indictments which have been drawn up against it.”

Liberals look out upon today’s world, says Prof. Frankel, with “their imaginations jaundiced and dispirited, doubtful about the fundamental categories in which to view their past, uncertain about the way to implement their hopes for the future, even uncertain about what hopes to have.” And he hopes that his book “can do something to revive that jaundiced imagination, and to restore, in a criticized form, the ideas and ideals which once nourished it.”