Books in Brief
Digressions on Some Poems by Frank O’Hara: A Memoir by Joe Le Sueur (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 305 pp., $25). Beauty has rarely revenged itself on wit with such thoroughness as it does in this book. Le Sueur’s memoir would make a biopic to stand beside “Citizen Kane” or “Mommie Dearest.” Frank O’Hara was one of the secret masters of midcentury America. He set the pace and the fashion, knew everyone, died young, and had the great good fortune to have been beloved by a man destined to be the Boswell of artists for his age. Every Boswell needs a Johnson, someone worthy to be studied like the Torah for his every interpretable utterance. O’Hara qualified. He had a knack for accurate snap judgments, a papal sense of his own inerrancy, a personal magnetism, and, at his core, a chip of unmeltable ice that destined his every love affair to end in heartbreak–for those who loved him.
Le Sueur was the ideal worshiper and victim, a man who could survive O’Hara’s egoism and the snubs of legions of O’Hara’s famous and envious friends (just about tout le beau monde of New York between 1949 and 1962). The secret of Le Sueur’s survival–he could never have been said to be successful–was his preternatural blond good looks. The book contains enough photos to make it clear that in the gay subculture of that (or any) era it would always have been O’Hara who was the gnome. The disparity must have been a gaff in his flesh.
–Thomas M. Disch
Educating for Liberty: The First Half-Century of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute by Lee Edwards (Regnery, 343 pp., $27.95). When he first put the idea onto paper, the founder of the “Intercollegiate Society of Individualists,” Frank Chodorov, predicted it might take fifty years to buttress principles such as respect for private property so they would not be trampled by collectivist sentiment on college campuses. In time for the fiftieth birthday of ISI–now the Intercollegiate Studies Institute–Lee Edwards examines the society’s history of “educating for liberty.”
The organization that began as a take-back-the-universities offshoot of the journal Human Events is now a multimillion-dollar enterprise with its own book imprint. ISI has always been an outside-the-Beltway observer of politics. “It is the duty of ISI,” Edwards writes, “to remind conservatives that in politics there are no permanent victories or defeats, only permanent things like wisdom, courage, prudence, and justice.” Edwards gives special consideration to those who weathered the cash-strapped early years. “Educating for Liberty” has a few editing slipups and factual errors, but they are basically insignificant to this fascinating history.
ISI still mails literature to teachers and students, as it did in the 1950s, but nowadays it also provides financial help to professors and internships for freedom-friendly journalists, and it publishes a well-regarded college guide. This “educational pillar,” Edwards writes, “promotes in a hundred different ways on a thousand different campuses its unwavering belief in ordered liberty and a humane economy.”
–Beth Henary
The Yom Kippur War: The Epic Encounter that Transformed the Middle East by Abraham Rabinovich (Schocken, 543 pp., $27.50). Israel’s dramatic victory in the Six Day War of 1967 still looms large in the minds of many Americans. Abraham Rabinovich’s “The Yom Kippur War” reminds us how close Israel came to an equally dramatic defeat in 1973. Rabinovich, a veteran of the U.S. Army and author of five previous books on military history, writes a compelling narrative and provides his readers with colorful accounts of such figures as Anwar Sadat, Ariel Sharon, Moshe Dayan, and Golda Meir.
Rabinovich has made a tremendous effort to understand the Sadat regime. Unfortunately, he is unable to offer similar insights into the Assad regime, having been stymied both by the continued isolation of the Baathist state and the closed nature of Syrian society. Particularly notable is Rabinovich’s examination of the role played by the superpowers in the conflict, each providing materiel and intelligence as well as the diplomatic framework for the cease-fire. Rabinovich pays particular attention to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, whose negotiations with Moscow, and shuttle-diplomacy between Cairo, Damascus, and Tel Aviv, represented the pinnacle of his career.
Though Rabinovich is successful in showing the high commands, he often fails to illuminate the situation on the ground. The book lacks sufficient maps to allow the reader to place the action. Still, those with a desire to understand the enduring conflict in the Middle East will be well served by Rabinovich’s gripping account.
–Michael Goldfarb
The Working Poor: Invisible in America by David K. Shipler (Knopf, 319 pp., $25). The poor are different from you and me–so a legion of journalists has descended upon this alien species to report the “exhausting struggles” of Americans who fix cars and wait tables. The genre includes “Nickel and Dimed” by Barbara Ehrenreich, “Random Family” by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, and “Growing Up Fast” by Joanna Lipper.
Now David Shipler adds “The Working Poor.” He roamed the country to relate the stories of people who work to survive and succeed. His subjects include a former drug addict near Washington, an immigrant waitress in California, farm workers in North Carolina, and a cancer-stricken mother in New Hampshire.
Unfortunately, Shipler’s research doesn’t support his assertion that the American “ethic of egalitarianism . . . touts the ideal of equal opportunity without actually providing it.” Shipler’s working-poor subjects do have opportunities to change and to grow, and many are happy to seize them. He includes a portrait of a sometimes-homeless single mother who shepherds her son to a financial-aid package at Dartmouth College. Shipler’s other families have success stories to tell: A recovering addict bubbles over with pride at her job at Xerox. An immigrant escapes a “re-education camp” in Vietnam to send his children to American colleges.
When the poor fail, Shipler makes excuses. Sarah and Willie, for example, spend their earned-income tax credit on tattoos while their three kids subsist on junk food in a borrowed house with broken windows. But, he notes, “even if Sarah and Willie had been models of frugality, their lives would still have been shackled to a heavy history of debt.” Shipler concludes that it is “time to be ashamed.” But strip away the lamentations, and the author has shown readers a generous, if imperfect, America in which hardworking, if imperfect, poor people can inch their way past minimum wage.
–Nicole Gelinas
Profiles, Probabilities, and Stereotypes by Frederick Schauer (Belknap, 359 pp., $29.95). Conventional wisdom mandates that law enforcement agencies tailor justice to individual cases. Frederick Schauer rejects this apparently simple piece of wisdom and forwards a provocative argument for generalization in law and daily life. While the book’s cover shows a police officer searching a swarthy man, Schauer considers the hot-button issue of profiling only one component of a much larger effort to defend the practice of making generalizations.
The book centers on what Schauer calls “statistically sound non-universal generalizations.” Such generalizations include statements like, “Pit bulls are dangerous,” “Driving drunk causes fatal accidents,” “Arab males commit many terrorist acts,” and “African-Americans commit a disproportionate share of crime.” While hardly anyone disputes their accuracy, taking them to their logical conclusions could result in unfair hassle and damage for members of groups in question.
But making generalizations, Schauer finds, plays a role in the justice system. Nearly all crimes that fall into the category of malum prohibitum–bad because they either carry a strong odor of even worse criminality (money laundering) or often lead to more serious offenses (drunk driving)–were outlawed because of a generalization or profile.
Not all insider traders seek to undermine confidence in the market, not all drunk drivers cause accidents, and not all civilians bringing guns onto airplanes want to commit a terrorist act. Profiling, Schauer finds, proves so central to the rule of law that it can’t be intrinsically unjust. Indeed, “total avoidance of generalization [is] impossible, but even the comparative avoidance of generalization is often unwise.”
Schauer concedes that the existence of a strong factual basis for generalization doesn’t mandate that we act on it. Sometimes, values such as equality may legitimately trump the efficiency of making a fine generalization: Perhaps the need to avoid any government-sponsored racial classifications overrides the improvements to public safety gained when police single out African-American men for searches. Certain accurate generalizations, likewise, perpetuate themselves to the disadvantage of a certain group and thus prove unjust. Before the 1970s, for example, many states prohibited women from administering estates–on the correct grounds that females lacked experience in law and business. Of course, the existence of laws like this insured that most women never gained such experience.
Schauer’s book has a few flaws: It is a bit repetitive, and it qualifies its conclusions too much. But these don’t detract from the book as a whole. Rather than indulge recriminations about racism or simple-minded nostrums about public safety, Schauer has shown that a society ruled by laws needs to make generalizations and, yes, create profiles.
–Eli Lehrer
