Books, Arts & Manners: The Right Books

There are occasions when reviewing books under the above rubric poses certain difficulties, most of them having to do with the dangers of disingenuousness, lack of candor, intellectual dishonesty. If you begin by categorizing a book as “right,” how far can you go in criticizing it without making yourself out to be a fool or a liar? To argue that a book is “right” in its heart or intent is literary criticism at its very lowest level; in fact, it is not criticism at all. On the other hand, there is such a thing as the book—and in this post-literate age there are more of them all the time—which, while its ideas are badly expressed, nevertheless points a certain sort of reader in a direction in which few other books will take him. In situations like these, perhaps the most honest service the reviewer can perform is to notice the thing more or less politely, leaving it to the reader to decide for himself whether to pursue it any further.

Victor Hugo wrote of France: “She is the first to awaken, the last to fall asleep. She presses forward. She is a searcher. . . . That is why the torch of Europe, which is civilization, was carried first by Greece, which passed it to Italy, which has passed it to France. Divine pioneering peoples—vitai lampada tradunt.” Thirty years before the publication of Les Misérables another Frenchman, Alexis de Tocqueville, had suggested that not France but the United States of America would prove both the inspiration and the model for the future: an opinion that was confirmed a century and a half after Tocqueville’s book by Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, Edgar Morin, and Jean-François Revel, whose conclusions have now been adopted, with attempts at enlargement, by Guy Sorman in The Conservative Revolution in America (Regnery Books, Regnery Gateway, Inc., 940 North Shore Drive, Lake Bluff, Ill. 60044; $9.95).

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About the Author

Chilton Williamson Jr.

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Conservatism

Ronald Reagan

Alexis de Tocqueville

There are occasions when reviewing books under the above rubric poses certain difficulties, most of them having to do with the dangers of disingenuousness, lack of candor, intellectual dishonesty. If you begin by categorizing a book as “right,” how far can you go in criticizing it without making yourself out to be a fool or a liar? To argue that a book is “right” in its heart or intent is literary criticism at its very lowest level; in fact, it is not criticism at all. On the other hand, there is such a thing as the book—and in this post-literate age there are more of them all the time—which, while its ideas are badly expressed, nevertheless points a certain sort of reader in a direction in which few other books will take him. In situations like these, perhaps the most honest service the reviewer can perform is to notice the thing more or less politely, leaving it to the reader to decide for himself whether to pursue it any further.

Victor Hugo wrote of France: “She is the first to awaken, the last to fall asleep. She presses forward. She is a searcher. . . . That is why the torch of Europe, which is civilization, was carried first by Greece, which passed it to Italy, which has passed it to France. Divine pioneering peoples—vitai lampada tradunt.” Thirty years before the publication of Les Misérables another Frenchman, Alexis de Tocqueville, had suggested that not France but the United States of America would prove both the inspiration and the model for the future: an opinion that was confirmed a century and a half after Tocqueville’s book by Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, Edgar Morin, and Jean-François Revel, whose conclusions have now been adopted, with attempts at enlargement, by Guy Sorman in The Conservative Revolution in America (Regnery Books, Regnery Gateway, Inc., 940 North Shore Drive, Lake Bluff, Ill. 60044; $9.95).