Sen McGlinn. Church and State: A Postmodern Political Theology. University of Leiden, 2005. 432 pages.
In light of the Haifan Universal House of Justice having declared Sen McGlinn a “kafir,” infidel, shortly after the 2005 publication of Church and State, the book resonates with many unintended ironies and contradictions. Written in hope of “recasting,” “reformulating,” […]
White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era. Shelby Steele. HarperCollins, 2006.
The approval by voters of the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative merely marks another step along the path of a much deeper cultural shift on the part of blacks and whites. The old formulas have not worked, are […]
Thomas Sowell, Black Rednecks and White Liberals. Encounter Books, 2005.
The approval by voters of the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative corroborates Thomas Sowell’s observation in his Preface to the book, referring to “a growing willingness to consider views that differ from the racial orthodoxy that has prevailed largely unchallenged from the 1960s onward in intellectual circles […]
John McWhorter. Winning the Race: Beyond the Crisis in Black America. Gotham, 2006.
John McWhorter’s Winning the Race has a strong sociological approach to the issues of black America, surveying the history of the development of the inner cities and the welfare system, leading to the dependence that later found expression in affirmative action and racial […]
Juan Williams, Enough: The Phony Leaders, Dead-End Movements, and Culture of Failure that are Undermining Black America–and What We Can Do About It. Crown, New York. 2006.
The major shortcoming of Juan Williams book is that he doesn’t go far enough. But more of that later. It should first be said that he goes very far […]
Creating Equal. My Fight Against Race Preferences. Ward Connerly
A Courageous Man and a Brilliant Book…. March 25, 2000
In Creating Equal, Ward Connerly returns the *human* dimension to the realities of race in America. Where so often what the poet Robert Hayden called “race rhetoric” substitutes for thought and dialogue, Connerly confronts long-held affirmative action […]
A Dream Deferred. The Second Betrayal of Black Freedom in America. Shelby Steele
Reawakening the Dream…. December 7, 2000
This morning, sometime around three or four AM, I woke up thinking about Shelby Steele’s A Dream Deferred. I read it a number of months ago and have been wanting to write a brief note about it. There […]
The Quest for Cosmic Justice by Thomas Sowell
Chastising the Self-Anointed…. June 27, 2000
Thomas Sowell may be one of the most despised black men in America-despised by extremist liberals, black and white, because Sowell has devoted his abilities to exposing their destructive ideologies of social redemption as counterproductive to the best interests of all Americans. Widely […]
Hating Whitey. And Other Progressive Causes. David Horowitz
For Betty - Oh God, What Have We Done…. June 16, 2000
One brings to a book everything one is and has been through. Let me discuss David Horowitz’s Hating Whitey by seemingly digressing a little on my own experience.
I grew up in the white suburbs of Detroit during […]
Tower of Babble. How the United Nations has Fueled Global Chaos. Dore Gold. Crown Forum, NY, 2004.
Half the Babbling Story…. July 12, 2006
Dore Gold tells the story of the corruption and failure of the dream of world organization and peace. Created in the aftermath of World War II, “to save succeeding generations from the scourge […]
UNvanquished. A US UN Saga, Boutros Boutros-Ghali
Global Tragedies of Our Own Making…. October 30, 2000
I’ve often thought or returned to passages in Boutros Boutros-Ghali’s Unvanquished since reading it in the early summer of 1999. Throughout the debate and defeat of the CTBT, the charades over Congressional withholding of funding to the UN, Jesse Helms’ appalling […]
The Vendor of Sweets (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics) by R. K. Narayan
India’s Kali Yuga…. December 21, 2000
The novelist R. K. Narayan (1906-) was born into a Tamil-speaking, Brahmin family. For several years he attended Christian schools in Madras, where he was raised by his grandmother, a devout Hindu who taught him the traditional songs and prayers. […]
A Roadside Dog by Czeslaw Milosz
Antinomies…. October 24, 2000
In A Year of the Hunter, Czeslaw Milosz unequivocally writes, “Poetry’s separation from religion has always strengthened my conviction that the erosion of the cosmic-religious imagination is not an illusion and that the vast expanses of the planet that are falling away from Christianity are the external […]
John Milton (Bloom’s Modern Critical Views) by Harold Bloom
Abdiel Agonistes…. October 24, 2000
John Milton’s reputation has unjustly suffered a diminution during the last two centuries. The romantics, repulsed by his religious theme of the earthly pilgrimage of the soul, corrupted his poem by maliciously interpreting Satan as the hero, despite Milton’s unequivocal condemnation of Satan […]
Poetry of Ryuichi Tamura
Vanishing…. October 12, 2000
For Japan and its writers, the modern darkness deepens during the period of military fascism and World War II. With the defeat and unconditional surrender, immense shock waves rocked the entire culture calling into question the pseudo-Shinto and Confucian values Japan had based its society on for almost a […]
Rats’ Nests. The Collected Poetry of Hagiwara Sakutaro (Translations of Modern Japanese Poetry Series) by Hagiwara Sakutaro
In Front of the Bridge…. October 1, 2000
By the end of the nineteenth century, several anthologies of Western literature had been translated and published introducing Japanese writers to a variety of new literary styles and genres. After a long […]
The Gourmet and Other Stories of Modern China by Wenfu Lu
A Decade of Upheaval…., June 25, 2000
I want to review The Gourmet and Other Stories of Modern China by focusing on one jewel of a story by Lu Wenfu (1928-), who suffered long and hard from the horrors of the communist regime and understands in […]