Religion in America
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"Turbulence at the Top: Our Peripatetic Generals" Lewis Sorley, in Army (March 1981); 2425 Wilson ~lvd., ~rling-ton. Va. 22201. The Army's readiness is hampered by policies that turn assignments in its senior echelons into a game of musical chairs, reports Sorley, a re- tired Army lieutenant colonel and chief of the CIA'S audit staff. The U.S. Army's General Staff, for example, consists of seven top generals, plus a Chief of Staff and a Vice Chief. Between 1960 and 1980, 86 different...
"~odand Natural Selection: The Darwin- ian Idea of Desian" bv Dov Osvovat. in Journal of the History of ~iolo~~ (Fall 1980), c/o 235 Science Center, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass. 02 138. Charles Darwin (1809-82), whose theory of evolution shook the founda- tions of religious faith in the West, claimed to believe in God-at least from 1838 to 1859, when he was formulating the theory. But recent biographers dispute him, citing unpublished jottings Darwin that characterize God as...
"The Making of Thomas Wolfe's post- humous Novels" John Halberstadt, in The Yale Review (Autumn 1980), 1902A Yale Station, New Haven, Conn. 06520. When is a Thomas Wolfe novel not a Thomas Wolfe novel? When, like The Web and the Rock (1939) and You Can't Go Home Again (1940), it was published posthumously-and edited by Edward Aswell. So writes Halberstadt, a former English instructor at Northeastern University. Wolfe (1900-38), a North Carolinian who won fame at age 29 for Look Homeward,...
by Michael Carver Putnam's 1981
by Czeslaw Milosz
Seabury, 1973
128 pp. $5.95
by B. Grossman
and Martha J. Kumar
Johns Hopkins, 1981
358 pp. $26.50
by David W. Plath
Stanford, 1980
235 pp. $17.50
by Edwin Hartrich
Macmillan, 1980
302 pp. $12.95
by Isabel de Madariaga
Yale, 1981
698 pp. $40
by William S. Mc
Norton, 1981
592 pp. $19.95
by Richard A. Goldthwaite
Johns Hopkins, 198 1
459 pp. $27.50
edited by Robert H. Ferrell
Norton, 1981
445 pp. $19.95
by Arthur M. Okun
Brookings, 198 1
367 pp. $19.95 cloth,
$7.95 paper
edited by Seweryn Bialer
Westview, 1981
441 pp. $35
by Martin B. Zimmerman
MIT, 1981
205 pp. $25
by Elizabeth Bow
Knopf, 1981
782 pp. $17.95
by E. L. Ranelagh
Quartet Books, 1979
(released in the United
States, 1981)
278 pp. $21.95
by Haydn Mason
Johns Hopkins, 1981
194 pp. $14.95
by S. Schoenbaum
Oxford, 1981
276 pp. $98
by John Gribbin
Delacorte, 1981
360 pp. $13.95
edited J. Kuehn
and Alan L. Porter
Cornell, 1981
530 pp. $35 cloth,
$9.95 paper
by Philip J. Davis
and Reuben Hersh
Birkhauser, 1981
440 pp. $24
By James Clif-
ford. McGraw-Hill, 1981. 377 & 372 pp.
respectively. $6.95 each
By Stanley Joel Reiser.
Cambridge, 1981.317 pp. $8.9
By Margarete Bie-
ber. Princeton, 1981. 343 pp. $15.00
By Jane Kramer. Vintage, 1981.217 pp. $4.95
By Daniel Hoffman. Vintage, 1981. 176 pp. $5.95
Two hundred years ago, Captain James Cook circled Antarctica, saw that it was ice-covered, and lamented that man would "de- rive no benefit from it." But European and, later, American ex- plorers still pushed south, driven what one of them called the "Intellectual Passion"-the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. By the end of the 19th century, Antarctica was the last un- charted territory on Earth. Today, the geography of the conti- nent is less mysterious; scientists probing...
's continental shelf may contain sizable reserves of oil and natural gas, perhaps matching those of Iran. And fishing fleets have already begun harvesting krill, the shrimp-like creatures, high in protein, that flourish in Ant- arctic waters. For the 14 nations with direct interests in the con- tinent, the payoff may not be far away.
Politically, Antarctica was sliced up like a pie before the end of World War 11, with wedge-shaped national claims radiating from the South Pole to the coast. Britain...
Peter John- son and a spare text Creina Bond and Roy Siegfried help to establish a sense of place, even if that place is al- ways shifting. Place a wooden stake at the South Pole, the writers ob- serve, and it will stay there for a mo- ment only: "Tomorrow the ice will have crept [several] centimeters."
Man got to know Antarctica slowly. One of the best accounts of the early voyages of exploration is Quest for a Continent (McGraw-Hill, 1957) by New York Times science editor Walter Sullivan....
"I don't care who does the electing," New York's William Marcy
"Boss" Tweed once remarked, "just so I can do the nominating."
Since the 1980 election, a number of leading scholars, under the
auspices of Duke University, the Wilson Center, and other in-
stitutions, have been taking a hard look at the U.S. presidential
nominating process. Their conclusion: It is too erratic, too time-
consuming, and too vulnerable to manipulation by minority fac-
tions. Partly...
The most important development within American Protestantism since the early 1970s has been the ascendancy of the evangelicals, a phenomenon that most journalists have described only in political terms, thereby contributing generously to public misunderstanding of the forces behind the evangelica
On October 11, 1962, Pope John XXIII solemnly convened the Second Vatican Council. Roman Catholicism has not been the same since. In the United States, nuns have traded in their religious habits for skirts, slacks, and Gucci bags. Priests appear in public dressed in shirt and tie; many of them openly differ with church authorities on such issues as birth control and di- vorce. Lay people occupy prominent positions in religious ser- vices. English has replaced Latin as the language of worship.
So...
Since the late 1960s, American Jews have been uneasy. This uneasiness is surprising; perhaps it is unwarranted. After all, probably no Jewish community in world history has been, at the same time, so numerous, so prosperous, so influential, so secure, as have American Jews during the past 30 years. American Jews have surpassed in these respects the remarkable position achieved by the Jews of Germany in the Weimar Republic. Tak- ing account of their much smaller numbers (one percent of the German...
LIGION IN AMERICA
"The religious history of the Ameri- can people [is] one of the grandest epics in the history of mankind. The stage is continental in size, and the cast is produced by the largest trans- oceanic migration and the most rapid continental dispersion of people the world has ever seen."
As Sydney E. Ahlstrom proceeds to show in his two-volume A Religious History of the American People (Yale, 1972, cloth; Doubleday, 1975, paper), a traveler making his way from Bos- ton to...
public agencies and private institutions
'Energy in Soviet Policy: A Study Prepared for the Use of the Joint Economic Committee, Congress of the United States."
Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C. 20402. 179 pp. $4.50.
The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency startled the world in 1977 pre- dicting that oil output in the Soviet Union, the world's largest producer, would soon peak; the communist world, said the agency, would become a major petroleum importer by 1985. The CIA has backed o...
In early 1778, midway between the The remedy was on its way. As
beginning of the American Revolu- early as 1776, the French had been
tion at Lexington and Concord and secretly supplying more than 90 per-
its military climax at the Battle of cent of the young American rebel
Yorktown, the American struggle army's gunpowder and many of its
was faltering. "Our affairs," wrote muskets, cannon, uniforms, and
General George Washington, "are in tents.
a more distressed, ruinous,...