More October Titles: Walter LaFeber argues in Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America (Norton, $18.95) that the U.S. has been the chief force in creating the governments and societies against which elements of the Central American populations are currently rebelling. … In his new book, The Economics and Politics of Race: An International Perspective (Morrow, $15.95), Thomas Sowell insists that the success of ethnic groups in America is, and has always been, determined largely by the cultures from which they spring and denies that political attempts to redress the “wrongs of history” can be efficacious. . . . John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Anatomy of Power (Houghton, $14.95) analyzes public and private power and concludes that, in America, the organized power of the military finds no countervailing balance, while the citizenry remains unaware of the degree to which its thought is controlled by a diversionary culture. . . . . . . The Politics at God’s Funeral: The Spiritual Crisis of Western Civilization (Holt, $16.95), by Michael Harrington, argues that the malaise of democratic Western countries is spiritual rather than economic and that only the creation of an “integrative” planetary consciousness can cure it. “God is political,” Harrington writes; he used to be a “leading conservative” but now he is almost dead (Yes, Virginia: there used to be a Michael Harrington).
The Middle of My Tether: Familiar Essays (Norton, $14.95) is a collection of witty and astute essays on all sorts of subjects by Joseph Epstein, the literary and cultural critic and editor of The American Scholar. … In The Roots of Treason: Ezra Pound and the Secret of St. Elizabeths (McGraw-Hill, $19.95), E. Fuller Torrey presents evidence that Pound feigned insanity to escape trial on a charge of treason in 1945 and that the Department of Defense, out of respect for his literary reputation, abetted the deceit. —CW
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