Editorials
From the Publisher
"Sophisticated . . . eloquent . . . strong stuff, badly in need of saying."-The New York Times Book Review"An important book . . . a plea for bridge building, for acknowledging differences and then doing the harder work of seeing beyond them."-Newsweek
Publishers Weekly -
Although these two studies look at political correctness from opposite poles, both authors exhort us to replace polemics with rational thought. Cheney, former head of the National Endowment for the Humanities, discusses postmodern thinking in academia, the arts, the media, and our legal system. She shows how fuzzy logic has weakened the standards of objectivity, pointing out as examples English and sociology faculty members who attack the scientific method and scholarly journals filled with ideologically slanted articles. Gitlin The Sixties, Bantam, 1987 examines the question in a broader social context, believing it has been overblown by conservatives. He also criticizes liberals for abandoning their leadership role in the fight for equal rights for all. Conservatives are now the cultural arbiters, and special-interest groups from both camps are engaging in futile power struggles while the nation limps along without a sense of mission. Dinesh D'Souza's Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus LJ 3/15/91 and Tom Englehardt's The End of Victory Culture LJ 1/95 complement these titles. Cheney is recommended for public and academic libraries, while Gitlin will interest academic audiences. [Cheney was previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 6/15/95.]Gary D. Barber, SUNY at Fredonia Lib.Nichols Rich
For a long time, Todd Gitlin writes, "an important part of being an American has been to take sides in culture wars over what it means to be an American." The problem with our obsession, Mr. Gitlin argues, is that "culture wars do not settle disputes." More importantly, they distract us from the critical problems we now face. What current and historical forces have led us to flay one another over questions of diversity and identity, ignoring such alarming phenomena as "the impoverishment of the cities"? Why do we allow increasingly vapid debates to drain away energies that could be applied to "the necessary discussion of what ought to be done about all the dying out there"?Gitlin, a former president of the Students for a Democratic Society and the author of several works on recent American history, including The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage and The Whole World is Watching: Mass Media in the Making and Unmaking of the New Left, is also clearly concerned by the fragmentation of the democratic left in America, its collapse into truculent special interest groups more concerned with agendas than with helping to generate "a vocabulary for the common good."
Surveying several decades of our recent past, Mr. Gitlin is persuasive and exact in identifying the origins of our unwillingness to deal with broad issues. If in the end his excavation of the sources of the failure of our society to address the true causes or inequality and violence is more persuasive than his suggestions for change, and if his indictment of current conditions seems to pin a disproportionate amount of the blame on the Right, Twilight is nonetheless a very useful book, carefully detailed, provocative and, finally quite loving. "Enough bunkers! Enough of the perfection of differences," Mr. Gitlin cries. "We ought to be building bridges." --Salon