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Essays | Winter 1992
BACKGROUND BOOKS

KGROUND BOOKS

THE SECOND COMING OF
THE AMERICAN SMALL TOWN
City and town planning is not a profession that many parents would encourage their children to enter. Especially since the disillusionments of the 1960s, the profession has fallen into pop- ular and intellectual disfavor. One recent his- tory, Diane Ghirardo's Building New Commu- nities: New Deal America and Fascist Italy
(Princeton, 1989), even suggests that the inten- tions of New Deal town builders were little dif- ferent from t...

Essays | Winter 1992
Affirmative Action And The American Creed

Seymour Martin Lipset
o achievement of 20th-cen- tury American politics sur- passes the creation of an enduring national consen-sus on civil rights. This consensus was forged dur-
ing the past quarter century a civil-rights
movement that compelled Americans fi-
nally to confront the wide gap between
their treatment of blacks and the egalitar-
ian values of their own cherished national
creed.
In recent years, however, the leaders of the civil-rights movement have shifted the focus from the...

Essays | Winter 1992
Affirmative Action And The American Creed

Despite the great civil-rights triumphs of the 1960s, the politics of race once again occupies center stage in American life. Yet what appears to be a conflict between blacks and whites, Seymour Martin Lipset argues, is more a struggle between the American public and the nation's political elite over the true meaning of equality.

Essays | Winter 1992
PACIFIC PROSPECTS

Frank B. Gibney

n his pioneering work on the Medi-
terranean world in the age of
Spain's Philip 11, historian Fernand
Braudel claims that the Mediterra-
nean region lacked any unity apart

from that "created the move-ments of men, the relationships they imply and the routes they follow.. . . The whole Mediterranean," Braudel continues, "con- sists of movement in space. Anything enter- ing it-wars, shadows of war, fashions, techniques, epidemics, merchandise light or heavy, pr...

Essays | Winter 1992
THE PROMISE OF THE PACIFIC

by FvaMk B. Gibney
I n his pioneering work on the Medi- terranean world in the age of Spain's Philip II, historian Fernand Braudel claims that the Mediterra- nean region lacked any unity apart from that "created by the move-ments of men, the relationships they imply and the routes they follow.... The whole Mediterranean," Braudel continues, "con- sists of movement in space. Anything enter ing it--wars, shadows of war, fashions, techniques, epidemics, merchandise light or heavy,...

Essays | Winter 1992
The Half-Empty Basin

was born in New Haven, Connecti-
cut, scarcely a year after World
War 11 ended, a child of the G.I.
Bill that financed my father's edu-
cation at Yale. Soon afterward my

parents moved to California, taking me along at the tender but obliging age of two years. My earliest memories therefore hang on Pacific horizons-glimpses of beach cliffs from toddler's eye-level just above the back seat of a 1940 Ford.
Westward movement was to become the constant of my life, a journey ever far- ther in...

Essays | Winter 1992
BACKGROUND BOOKS

Frank B. Gibney
n his pioneering work on the Medi-
terranean world in the age of
Spain's Philip 11, historian Fernand
Braudel claims that the Mediterra-
nean region lacked any unity apart
from that "created the move-ments of men, the relationships they imply and the routes they follow.. . . The whole Mediterranean," Braudel continues, "con- sists of movement in space. Anything enter- ing it-wars, shadows of war, fashions, techniques, epidemics, merchandise light or heavy, precious...

Essays | Winter 1992
Mozart and tlhe Wolf Gang

hat can a mere writer writer can deal only with the externals or say about Mozart? Mu- superficialities of a musician's achieve- sic is the art that takes ment. The Life of Mozart has been delin- over from words when eated far too often, sometimes with melo- words prove inade-dramatic falsehoods. The truth is mostly quate, and I've spent banal and has a great deal to do with much of this bicentennial year trying to de- money. I set up for myself a dialogue be- vise a verbal approach to Mozart...

Essays | Winter 1992
Is There Hope For Pushkin's Children?

certain tricky questions arise from time to time in literary circles. No one knows who first asked them, and they of- ten seem a pointless game. For instance: Would you, as a writer, continue to write if you ended up on an uninhabited island and it seemed that no one would ever read your work? Many writers answer: Yes, of course I would, I don't need a reader, I'm my own reader, I'm incapable of not writing, I am my own source of inspiration, no one should come between me and God, and so forth....

Essays | Winter 1992
The Fuss About Ideology

The world of thought is both-
ered and bewildered about ideology: the world of educa- tion above all. Distortions of the vantage point, such as Eurocentricity or linear logic,
it fears, invalidate everything that histori- ans, critics, even scientists have ever done or may ever do.
In seminars the word acts like a si-lencer. It can bring rational debate to a stop, and the fear of its use can inhibit criti- cal debate even before it begins. Softened, at times, into vague, emollient talk about...

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