This is pretty interesting….
Audio:
[podcast]http://graphics8.nytimes.com/podcasts/2011/01/28/28bookreview.mp3[/podcast]
The Story via the NYT:
Irving Kristol, who died in 2009, is sometimes called the “godfather” or even “father” of neoconservatism, and the patriarchal honorific, like a well-worn hat, sits comfortably atop “The Neoconservative Persuasion: Selected Essays, 1942-2009.” The book is strictly a family enterprise. It has been lovingly edited by Kristol’s widow, the historian Gertrude Himmelfarb, and carries a prefatory funeral eulogy by their sorrowful son, the Republican journalist William Kristol. Even the selection of essays reflects a uniquely familial degree of intimacy.
Himmelfarb recounts in her introduction that while “rummaging among old files” after her husband’s death, she discovered tattered copies of a short-lived and wholly forgotten little magazine called Enquiry: A Journal of Independent Radical Thought. Her husband and some of his young friends founded the magazine in 1942, the year of her marriage, and they kept it afloat for eight issues, until the young friends and Kristol himself disappeared into the Army. Himmelfarb has reproduced the cover of Vol. 1, No. 1 — austere, elegant, partly sans-serif in the 1940s style, 10 cents a copy — and the sight of the magazine does conjure an era.
(…)
There is sometimes a charm in Kristol’s prose, once he had gotten past his pompous Lionel Trilling period — a wry, man-of-the-people modesty, nicely joined with a genuine talent for summarizing ideas. Then again, he tried to capitalize on his Everyman sonority by claiming to speak on behalf of “the majority of Americans” or even “the overwhelming majority of Americans,” and sometimes “the American people” altogether, which, to my mind, undercuts the charm. In the course of an otherwise intelligent essay about Communism and McCarthyism as long ago as 1952, he wrote: “For there is one thing that the American people know about Senator McCarthy; he, like them, is unequivocally anti-Communist. About the spokesmen for American liberalism, they feel they know no such thing.”
The remark is one of Kristol’s most famous, if only because his enemies have been quoting it back at him for almost 60 years. The habit of invoking the American people served him well, even so. Some of the more talented leaders of the Republican Party eventually cocked an ear in his direction, in search of oratorical and political and programmatic possibilities. And the alliance was formed.
Himmelfarb has thoughtfully filled “The Neoconservative Persuasion” with pieces that, with one exception, have not appeared in previous collections. The subtitle, “Selected Essays,” might lead readers to suppose that here must surely be Kristol’s Greatest Hits — the best and most popular of his essays. But Kristol himself gathered together his Greatest Hits in an anthology in 1995 called “Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea.”
The new book ought to be regarded, instead, as a Volume 2. It is faithful to his ideas and their evolution. And it offers an opportunity to evaluate his abilities as an essayist — his achievements as a thinker and writer within the little world known as the “New York intellectuals.” The achievements do not seem to me large. Kristol was not a Trilling, a Hook, a Howe or a Bell. For that matter, he never produced anything as substantial as his wife’s scholarly meditations on English history.
But it is true that unlike any of those other talented people, Kristol, with his tirades and simplicities, helped found a political movement. And under the name of “neoconservatism,” his movement invigorated the party of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush and, for better and for worse, wreaked enormous changes on America and the world.
As many of you know. I do have personal issues with the Neo-Conservative as a whole. However, I believe it to be fair to examine the history of the people around it. The book sounds like it might be an interesting read.
You can get it here:
There are those that might not like that I even blogged about this; to them I say this. Perhaps if you put some money into my Tip Jar, maybe I would not have to resort to blogging about subjects that I utterly detest. Further more, the way I see it, when those people start donating to this blog; then they can bitch at me about what I write about. Until then, quite frankly, they can just fuck off. (and I mean that in the most Christian way possible… 😛 😉 😀 )
Not only that, I do try; even I disagree with that person — to get everyone a fair shake. I might disagree with them on some things, but there has to be something that I agree upon. If only the Neo-Cons felt the same way about us that disagree with them. Most of them are almost Nazi like in their fascism against dissenters. The Bush era proved that one. 🙄
