The CIA is a broken, Soviet-style bureaucracy with its own agenda: to consume federal funds, to expand within the United States, to feign activity, and to enrich current and former employees. After 9/11, billions of dollars directed by Congress to increase the number of officers working under deep cover on foreign streets have disappeared without the CIA fielding a single additional, productive officer overseas.

The Human Factor makes the case for intelligence reform, showing the career of an accomplished deep cover CIA case officer who struggled not with finding human sources of secret information in rogue nations, but with the CIA’s bloated, dysfunctional, even cancerous bureaucracy. After initial training in the US, Ishmael Jones spent his career in multiple, consecutive overseas assignments, as a deep cover officer without benefit of diplomatic immunity. In dingy hotel rooms, Jones met alone with weapons scientists, money launderers, and terrorists. He pushed intelligence missions forward while escaping purges within the Agency, active thwarting of operations by bureaucrats, and the ever-present threat of arrest by hostile foreign intelligence services. Jones became convinced that the CIA’s failure to fulfill its purpose endangers Americans. Attempting reform from within proved absurd. Jones resigned from the CIA to make a public case for reform through the writing of this book.

Effective American organizations feature clear missions, streamlined management, transparency, and accountability. The CIA has none of these. While it has always hired good people, it wastes and even perverts employees. The CIA is not doing its job and must be fixed. Until it is, our lives and the lives of our allies are in jeopardy.

——–

Ishmael Jones represents an altogether uncommon breed of CIA officer, one willing to risk life and career in the pursuit of gathering better intelligence. If the CIA as a whole shared this one officer’s relentless pursuit of WMD sources, terrorists, and the rogue nations that support them, then we might find ourselves in a much safer world today. With his book The Human Factor, Jones relates the details of his extraordinary career with a notable lack of bravado and a tremendous amount of dry wit. I laughed out loud at descriptions of CIA characters and culture that were all too familiar. Jones represents the kind of CIA officer that I—and many other neophyte spies—had always hoped to encounter as a supervisor. Wisely, however, Jones sidestepped managerial positions in order to remain exactly where he should have been: active in the field.

Lindsay Moran
Author of Blowing My Cover: My Life as a CIA Spy

This book should be required reading for anyone who serves in our government or is served by it. But beware: Reading The Human Factor will make you very, very angry. For Ishmael Jones, better than any previous spook, peels back layer upon layer of deception to show how dysfunctional the CIA is. Even in the wake of 9/11, when the CIA was inundated with fresh funding, it has failed to cure its cultural ills or to dispatch large numbers of clandestine operatives abroad without State Department cover. Ishmael Jones has served his nation honorably and bravely as a member of the CIA’s Clandestine Service, but he has provided no greater service than to risk his former employer’s wrath to alert us to the CIA’s continuing, crippling woes.

Max Boot, senior fellow in national security studies,
The Council on Foreign Relations
Author of The Savage Wars of Peace and War Made New

We live in an age of unprecedented human power—over birth and death, body and mind, nature and human nature. In every realm of life, science and technology have brought us remarkable advances and improvements: we are healthier, wealthier, and more comfortable than ever before. But our gratitude for the benefits of progress increasingly mixes with concern about the meaning and consequences of our newfound powers. If we can dream about a new age of genetic medicine, we can also shudder at a new age of weapons of mass destruction. As we welcome longer lives, we wonder if we will still value life as we should. Science remakes our everyday experience of being human, but it also fails to answer our deepest longings—for love, for virtue, and for transcendence.

In the Shadow of Progress is a deep and lively reflection on the moral challenges of the technological age. Eric Cohen, a leading voice in America’s bioethics debates, offers a tour of the complex dilemmas at the intersection of science and morality.

Why are the wealthiest people in human history the least likely to want children? What kind of civilization will we become if we seek cures for the sick by destroying human embryos, or if we pick and choose our offspring by genetic profiling? What is lost when we relieve human sadness by altering the chemical balance of the brain, or enhance human performance by altering the biological workings of the body? In this age of scientific wonders, have we forgotten what makes human beings different from everything else in the natural world? Our great challenge, Cohen argues, is to live simultaneously with gratitude and fear, pride and shame, sobriety and hope, in this new age of technology.

——–

In this profound and beautifully written book, Eric Cohen, a precociously wise new commentator on the relation of science and ethics, illuminates the deepest meanings of the new age of biotechnology. A must-read for anyone who wants to understand where science may be taking us, and why it matters—in short, a book for everyone.

Leon R. Kass, M.D. Addie Clark Harding Professor The Committee on Social Thought The University of Chicago

Technological progress has brought us many blessings, and promises still more. Only a fool would oppose it. But, as Eric Cohen reminds us in his important new book, technology cannot answer life’s most profound questions or requite our deepest longings. Even where technological progress is sought for good ends, it can be pursued by bad means. We can yield to the temptation to sacrifice the lives of some human beings—such as those at the earliest stages of development or those in debilitated conditions—in the hope of healing others. Cohen’s In the Shadow of Progress is a book rich in moral insight and even prophetic wisdom.

Robert P. George McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence Director, James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions Princeton University

Eric Cohen is a relatively new voice in bioethics and technology studies—and a most welcome one. His book, In the Shadow of Progress, is a rich exploration of the idea of progress in medicine and biology, drawing on sources new and old, and putting them together in a most felicitous way. It is a rewarding book to read, and one cannot ask more of a book.

Daniel Callahan Director, International Program The Hastings Center

——–

Introduction: The Question of Progress

When my son was born, he had trouble breathing—visible to his nervous father in the bluish tint of his skin, diagnosed by the attending physician from the low percentage of oxygen in his blood. So off he went, within minutes, to the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU). He was, truth to tell, the healthiest child in a row of babies struggling to survive. He was a giant among “preemies”—there for observation, not because only modern machines and master physicians could keep him alive. After a few days, he was released and reunited with his waiting mother. We rolled him from the third floor to the sixth, from NICU to normal, from anxiety to relief. Blessed by nature, blessed by science, we left the hospital “on schedule.” We also knew that many children did not, and that some children never left at all. Nature is not always so generous; science is not always so powerful. But for us, in those moments, we marveled at both.

A few days later, my son was circumcised in the traditional Jewish way—in our home, by a mohel, with grandparents present. The mohel’s instruments were archaic compared to the machinery of the NICU; the modern beeping of the incubators gave way to ancient blessings and rituals that have persisted from generation to generation for millennia. If the NICU exemplifies the most elevated ambitions of progress—to heal the broken body, to sustain life in the face of death, to correct nature’s mistakes—the bris is a reminder of the permanent horizons of human life—the mystery of human origins, the cycle of the generations, the eternal drama of rearing those who will one day stand in one’s place, and, in the normal course of things, at one’s graveside. The bris embodies the eternal hope that lies beyond progress; what it aims to sanctify—the welcoming of a new child—is not a novel artifact of the current age but a primordial experience of being human.

Yet, remarkably, one of the defining features of the modern era is that the most modern individuals are not having enough children to sustain their societies from one generation to the next. Communities defined by their ancient faith continue to have children in high numbers, believing they have something sacred to sustain in the flesh and rearing of their young. But those most immersed in the pleasures and possibilities of modern life seem least driven to raise up a generation to follow in their footsteps. Societies defined by the forward march of progress are failing to bring life forward in the most fundamental sense. What faith, we are left to wonder, does modern man have in the cosmic significance of modern, individualist, technological life? If procreation is the deepest form of fidelity to one’s civilization, then what does modern man’s infidelity say about the relative greatness (or goodness) of the modern age? Is progress really progress?

One might ask this question—is progress really progress?—about many domains of modern life: Is it progress to ameliorate human sadness by altering the chemical balance of the brain? Is it progress to seek cures for the sick by destroying human embryos? Is it progress to screen and select the genetic make-up of one’s offspring? Is it progress to wield the force of the split atom, or to transform the habitats of nature into oil fields?

Opposition to traditional religion; multiculturalism and cultural relativism; materialism; belief in scientific rationality as the ultimate arbiter of human value: taken together, these features of the secularist’s creed underwrite a view of life that is ill equipped to meet the challenge of a zealous enemy with totalitarian ambitions. In undermining the traditional roots of America, argues Herb London, secular humanism has destroyed the West’s only beliefs worth defending.

This anemic remodeling of our culture has left us exposed in the monumental battle against ideological forces with radical global ambitions. America’s Secular Challenge is a sobering wake-up call and a battle plan for the political and existential trials of the twenty-first century

——–

“Herbert London mounts a powerful and persuasive argument that the undermining of the Judeo-Christian tradition by its secular rival causes a failure of resolve in the West at a time when it is necessary to confront the existential threat of radical Islam. America’s Secular Challenge deserves to be widely read and deeply pondered.”

R. H. Bork

“In this insightful volume Herb London lays bare the assumptions behind the new faith of secularism and the challenge this doctrine poses to America’s traditional ideals of self government, patriotism, and national strength. Mr. London presents clear answers to the troubling questions he poses. America’s Secular Challenge deserves to be read by Americans of all faiths.”

James Piereson
Senior Fellow
The Manhattan Institute

“America’s Secular Challenge is the widow’s cruse of moral and political philosophy. Because it is a book of modest length, it ought logically to contain only a modest amount of wisdom and commonsense. Yet because it draws on the accumulated experience both of the Judaeo-Christian religious tradition and of the Anglo-American political tradition of ordered liberty, there is for practical purposes an infinite amount of wisdom and commonsense in its pages. However much you take out, somehow there’s always a little more left–on for example the real meaning of tolerance or the necessity of patriotism. You simply have to turn the page.”

John O’Sullivan

“Political religion first emerged out of the cauldron of the French Revolution as Jacobinism. In his short but compelling book Herb London shows that today’s militant secularists are, in their own way, the heirs of the Jacobins- but with a difference. While the Jacobins had a positive, as they saw it, program; todays militant secularists are merely negative. But, as London shows, their hostility to the values underlying American life, at time when they are under attack from radical Islam, represents a threat we shouldn’t underestimate.”

Fred Siegel,
The Cooper Union for Science and Art

“I suspected there was something amiss with the secular humanist purrings and now Herb London has made it all very clear with wide learning and deep insight for which I am grateful. This is an essential book.”

R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr.
Founder and Editor in Chief
The American Spectator

“With wisdom distilled by a lifetime’s engagement with ideas that matter, Herb London offers a compelling invitation to believe again in truths upon which our future depends.”

(The Rev.) Richard John Neuhaus
Editor in Chief First Things

“No one, to my knowledge, has done a better or more lucid job of exposing the fallacies and depredations of radical secular humanism than Herbert London does in this wonderfully trenchant and powerfully argued little book.”

Norman Podhoretz

——–

Introduction

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

—W. B. Yeats, “The Second Coming”

Great changes are afoot in Western culture. The world as we’ve known it is becoming a markedly different place, and a more dangerous one, where the very basis of our civilization is increasingly challenged. Let me begin by identifying some of the intellectual and moral factors that are altering our cultural landscape.

The first is multiculturalism, an attitude that proclaims the equality of all cultures but paradoxically assumes that non-Western cultures are somehow more equal, more worthy, than their Western counterparts. This Orwellian phenomenon preaches the gospel of equality, but proceeds as much from self-loathing as from egalitarianism. If women in America on average earn less than men, that is a form of oppression; but if an African culture indulges in ritual mutilation in the form of clitordectomy, that, for the multiculturalist, is simply an expression of cultural difference.

A second factor precipitating cultural change in the West is the decay of religion. European churches are now more museums than places of worship. And even the much-touted religiousness of Americans is often more a function of social activity rather than spiritual observance. In the precincts of elite culture, anyway, the moral and spiritual teachings of Christianity have been in large part interred and replaced by a tepid relativism or various “new age” or “spiritual” outlooks.

A third shift in attitude is that extreme form of liberalism in which the traditional liberal virtue of tolerance has degenerated into an unwillingness to discriminate. According to this anesthetic philosophy, right and wrong are archaic concepts that belong to the ash heap of history. What counts is “openness,” that perversion of tolerance that, as Allan Bloom observed in The Closing of the American Mind, is indistinguishable from indifference.

Secularists nurture a hope that rationalism, now that it has supplanted religion, can solve all problems. If only people—or their more far-sighted representatives—are playing on the same field, then all the world’s heretofore unsolvable problems can be solved. This is the fourth shift, a utopian delusion has led to the rise of transnationalism. In our time, the chief example of the trend is the effort to reduce or eliminate the national heritage of European states through continental harmonization. This effort has had the unintended consequence of making citizens rudderless, robbing them of their national identity and undermining their patriotism. In the United States, transnationalism has adherents who argue that the American experience should be recast as merely one species of world history. But such proposals invariably lose sight of American exceptionalism, suggesting that the United States is like all other nations.

The last factor in the West’s cultural shift is a loss of existential confidence that is at the same time a failure of nerve. The retreat of apostolic teaching is a case in point. Catholicism, despite many new converts, is culturally in retreat, not only as a religion but as an authoritative voice of moral conviction. Pope Benedict XVI was utterly correct when he told a youthful audience, “The great challenge of our time is secularism,” adding that, “Society creates the illusion that God does not exist, or that God can be restricted to the realm of purely private affairs. Christians cannot accept that attitude. This is the first necessity: that God becomes newly present in our lives.”

Implicitly, the Pope was arguing that the philosophic underpinnings of the West are under assault as much from the privatization of belief as from external enemies. If the vigorous liberalism cherished by America’s Founding Fathers underwrites our political freedom, its degeneration into relativistic “openness” has left us prey to the blandishments of fanatics.

Lest the reader conclude from all this that I am some fundamentalist Christian calling for a Great Awakening, let me stress that my concern about the rise of radical secularism and its attack on the Christian foundations of the West is entirely independent of my own religious convictions. Just as the historian Perry Miller, an agnostic, came to appreciate the power of Puritanism in advancing the American agenda, so I, a Jew, have come to appreciate the role that Christianity plays in buttressing Western democracies. I can hear the guffaws of secularists over that line, especially from those who see in any religious defense an argument for theocracy. But the historical truth is that our way of life, including the liberty ensconced in liberalism, emerged from and is sustained by Christian principles.

In 1954 President Eisenhower, not typically remembered for his Christian observance, said, “Our government makes no sense unless it is founded on deeply religious faith and I don’t care what it is.” This may be a reflection of Eisenhower’s Erasmian view of religion as something taking its force more from commitment to moral conduct than from theological dogma. Even so, Eisenhower here was suggesting something unique about faith in the public service.

Of course, faith comes in many forms. Secularism itself is a kind of faith, as is the dogmatic commitment to scientific rationality, to which so many secularists appeal in the hopes of answering moral and ontological questions that were once answered by religion. Even what the sociologist Robert Bellah, and Rousseau before him, called “civil religion” involves faith in the achievements and existential vitality of our republican traditions, including its religious traditions.

For the secular humanist, the fact that the mass of humanity may be unable to live without religion is not dispositive. In considering this matter, however, the secularist disinters a “religious” canon of his own, one that has a distinct value system even as it rejects Christianity and Judaism. Of course, the secularist challenge to religion has been an important social force since the Enlightenment. What is different today is the unwitting collusion between some of the attitudes fostered by secularism and those promoted by the enemies of the West. As Bernard Lewis, a great scholar of Islam, and others have observed, democracies around the world face an imminent danger from elements within their own societies that often pose as pro-peace and human rights. In the West, the leftist naiveté that exaggerates the imperfections in democracy has fueled the Islamic agenda that challenges the West.

It has become increasingly obvious that, like it or not, the West is locked in a civilizational struggle with radical Islam. According to Norman Podhoretz, we are already engaged in World War IV (World War III having been the decades-long Cold War). As the first decade of the twenty-first century comes to a close, it seems clear that there will either be a rebirth of the West, bolstered by a resuscitation of its key traditions, or further disintegration as we struggle ineptly against fanaticism. As Mark Steyn has shown in America Alone, the startling demographic decline of Europe and Russia—the birthrate in Europe as a whole is 1.38 percent, significantly below “replacement” level—all but assures a showdown with rapidly multiplying Islamic populations. Meanwhile, the strategy of Islamists is clear: destroy Israel, create a Middle East devoid of any religion but Islam, employ the oil empire to create caliphates from Madrid to Jakarta and then launch a holy war against the West. What remains to be seen is whether such a philosophy would face any real opposition by a weakened West in the decades to come.

In this struggle America is perceived as the Great Satan, not merely by enemies such as Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda, but by supposed allies in Egypt and western Europe. For example, Egyptian MP Mustafa Zakri recently opined that “America is the head of the serpent, and the greatest enemy, which we must confront.”

The root of this enmity is centuries old: Some trace it to the victory of Charles Martel at the Battle of Tours in 732. It is not coincidental that Sheik Nasrallah, leader of Hezbollah, continually makes reference to the history of Saladin and refers to the United States and Israel as “crusaders.” Yet there is a nagging question: Why now? Why were there coordinated, violent demonstrations across the globe over cartoons that caricatured the prophet Mohammed? Why is every real or perceived slight against Islam exaggerated into a casus belli? After all, in the Divine Comedy, Dante meets Mohammed suffering in the fires of hell. The Cathedral of Bologna has shown frescoes of Mohammed seen in an unfavorable light for hundreds of years.

Certainly part of the reason for the recent tumult is the belief circulating in the Islamic world that a secular West no longer has the will to resist Islamic jihad. The compromises and willingness to accommodate Islamic factions in European societies are interpreted as signs of weakness. The more open and liberal the society, the more likely it is a target for jihad. It was no accident, as the Marxists used to say, that Denmark and Holland, two of the most radically secular countries in Europe, should have been the site of some of the most violent Islamic outrages in recent years: in Denmark, the destructive riots that exploded in the aftermath of the publication of cartoon caricatures of Mohammed in the Jyllands-Posten; in Holland, the grisly murder of the filmmaker Theo van Gogh on the streets of Amsterdam.

For Islamists, the moment for a triumphalist campaign has arrived, a moment not unlike the jihad Mohammed launched against the three Jewish tribes in Arabia in the seventh century. That the West considers this Islamic fanaticism a form of acting out over deplorable conditions faced by Muslims within their own borders also plays to Islam’s strength. Believing that there must be a rational explanation for seemingly irrational behavior, Western leaders and opinion makers bend over backwards to contrive exculpatory explanations. Rarely do they come to the conclusion that the violence is fomented by religious zealotry no liberal concessions can possibly mitigate.

The riots that attend ever minor offense are aimed at breaking Western will. They are a tactic to test the fortitude of the West, to see if there is any devotion that can withstand the onslaught. If one were to consider the feeble response from European capitals, one would have to conclude that the Islamic clerics are right. Rather than treat the riots as a frontal attack on the West, most leaders describe the incidents as aberrations, a function of high unemployment rates or poor housing conditions.

Consider the incendiary pronouncements of the Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has repeatedly promised to “wipe Israel off the map.” Many commentators in the West discount Ahmadinejad’s rhetoric as a form of propaganda that should not be taken too seriously. But why not? Liberal bien pensants took the same tack with Hitler in the 1930s, ignoring or rationalizing his extreme pronouncements as the unfortunate but mostly harmless rantings of a madman. We all know what the fruits of their appeasement were. It is the same with Ahmadinejad. His call for martyrdom is a plea for Armageddon. What he says is precisely what he and the mullahs believe.

There is a civilizational fatwa metastasizing around the globe, from Hamburg to Tehran, from Nablus to Malmo, from Copenhagen to Islamabad. For Muslims, jihad is in the air and the more it manifests itself in orchestrated street theater, the more it will highlight the weakness of the West. The confrontation between radical Islam and the West is fast becoming the defining test of our age. How that contest unfolds remains to be seen. But if the West cannot marshal the strength to defend its core values, these contemporary Crusades will assuredly end in disaster. Part—a large part, in fact—of that task is spiritual. It involves challenging the gospel of radical secularism, according to which the goal of human life is entirely defined by material well-being.

What the political philosopher James Burnham observed about the West’s confrontation with Communism is even truer with respect to its confrontation with radical Islam. “No one,” Burnham wrote, “is willing to sacrifice and die for progressive education, Medicare, humanity in the abstract, the United Nations, and a ten percent rise in Social Security payments.” And yet such “bloodless abstractions” essentially exhaust what secularism has on offer. “Things fall apart,” Yeats wrote in his famous poem, “the centre cannot hold.” It is not yet certain whether Yeats’s dour vision is more a news report or a warning. I believe that we still command the resources to salvage the spiritual center of our civilization. But to accomplish this we must have the courage to challenge the seductive tenets of radical secularism and revivify the traditional values that informed and nourished America. This book is a contribution to that task.

Encounter Books, the conservative publishing house run by Roger Kimball, will no longer send review copies to the New York Times. In an amusing and much-discussed item posted to the company’s Encounter Intelligence Web log, Mr. Kimball explained that the Times has “studiously” ignored almost all of his titles, and so if it plans to review any in the future, it will have to buy them like any other reader.

In a phone interview with The New York Sun, Mr. Kimball said he doesn’t think his decision will jeopardize the financial health of his company; if anything, it might serve as a “wake-up call” to Times Book Review Editor Sam Tanenhaus, whom Mr. Kimball describes as a “moderate left-wing opportunist” responsible for perpetuating the “travesty” that has become of a once justly celebrated organ of cultural criticism. The Times is now a clearinghouse of “press releases emanating from the p.c. seats of established opinion” and “metrosexual lifestyle stuff,” Mr. Kimball said. (Mr. Tanenhaus did not return The Sun’s phone call for comment.)

Read the rest here.

“But wait,” you might be thinking, “I don’t recall the Times reviewing titles from Encounter Books.” Precisely! By and large, they don’t, at least in recent years. That’s part of the calculation: why bother to send them books that they studiously ignore?

In the last month, Encounter has had two titles on the extended New York Times best-seller list: Climate Confusion: How Global Warming Hysteria Leads to Bad Science, Pandering Politicians and Misguided Policies that Hurt the Poor by Roy Spencer, and Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad, by Andrew C. McCarthy. But that list is the only place you will find these books mentioned in the pages of The New York Times. We’ve also published other brisk-selling books that the Times has ignored—Guy Sorman’s Empire of Lies: The Truth About China in the Twenty-first Century, for example, or Philip F. Lawler’s Faithful Departed: The Collapse of Boston’s Catholic Culture, or Bruce Thornton’s Decline and Fall: Europe’s Slow Motion Suicide or Caroline Fourest’s Brother Tariq: The Doublespeak of Tariq Ramadan, to name just a few recent titles.

Not, I hasten to add, that Encounter’s experience is unique. Consider, to take just one example, Mark Steyn’s book America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It, published in 2006 by Regnery. This is a brilliant book about one of the most pressing issues of our time—the threat of radical Islam and the West’s loss of cultural confidence. It perched for weeks on the Times’s bestseller list. But that was the only place in the Times you would see the book mentioned because the Times’s editors chose to ignore it.

In favor of what, you might ask? Well, there are reviews of books about people like Ron Jeremy, a porn star, and then there are reviews of books like Jenna Jameson’s How to Make Love Like a Porn Star. And let’s not forget Hung: A Meditation on the Measure of Black Men in America and The Surrender: The Beauty of Submission, a meditation on the joys of sodomy by a former ballerina, both of which got full reviews in the Times (actually, The Surrender got several notices). Not that the Times is monomaniacal. In the current issue of the Book Review, there is a review of a book by a University of California linguist that endeavors to explain “how the right wins and keeps power: by framing issues and controlling minds.” I knew there had to be some reason.

Do you see a pattern here? The Times had nothing but praise for What Liberal Media? The Truth About Bias and the News (“impressively researched and documented”) by The Nation’s Eric Alterman, but it completely ignored William McGowan’s Coloring the News: How Political Correctness Has Corrupted American Journalism, which won the National Press Club’s Arthur Rowse Award for Press Criticism but, being published by Encounter and being critical of the Times, just didn’t make the cut. At Encounter, we started making a list of the important conservative books that the Times ignored. We gave it up after we realized it was going to amount to a small library of titles.

“But the Times does review conservative books,” you say: “I have seen some reviewed.”

Well, there is also that to be considered. One of the only books published by Encounter that the Times has deigned to review in the last few years is Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism by James Piereson. Since I am the publisher, I won’t pass judgment on the book other than to say that it is a serious analysis of how Kennedy’s assassination by a Communist radical marked an important turning point in American liberalism. “The assassination of a popular president by a Communist,” Piereson argues, “should have generated a revulsion against everything associated with left wing doctrines. Yet something close to the opposite happened. In the aftermath of the assassination, left wing ideas and revolutionary leaders, Marx, Lenin, Mao, and Castro foremost among them, enjoyed a greater vogue in the United States than at any time in our history.”

Was Piereson right? I think so. But there is certainly room for disagreement and debate. What the Times treated its readers to, however, was not debate but sophomoric disparagement. It sent the book to Jacob Heilbrunn—“a regular contributor to the Book Review,” according to his tag line, but also a sometime conservative who for the last few years has specialized in heaping abuse upon his former ideological allies. Accordingly, Heilbrunn did not so much review the book as trash it. The tenor, and the level of intellectual sophistication, of his piece is neatly summed up in its conclusion, where Heilbrunn, appropriating a line from Richard Hofstadter, describes Camelot and the Cultural Revolution as “rubbish.” (At least in this instance Heilbrunn acknowledged his appropriation: as Corey Robin has shown in a devastating review of Heilbrunn’s book They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons, Heilbrunn often appropriates without acknowledgment.)

Again, Encounter is hardly the only publisher to be treated to such smarmy and uncomprehending trivialization when the book under review is recognizably conservative. I could cite many examples, but will mention only the outrageous review accorded to Harvey Mansfield’s book Manliness, published by Yale University Press. Mansfield is a prominent—probably the prominent—conservative political philosopher at Harvard. But leave his politics aside: Mansfield is as distinguished a scholar as you will find in the academy: a translator and interpreter of Tocqueville, of Machiavelli, of Leo Strauss. He is an intellectual giant. But the editors at the Times Book Review couldn’t contemplate a book on manliness—talk about politically incorrect!—without sniggering. So they sent Mansfield’s book to Walter Kirn, intellectual lilliputian, who, like Heilbrunn, is “a regular contributor to the Book Review” and who disgorged a contemptible and condescending review in which stupidity competed mightily with malice.

Once upon a time, and not that long ago, it meant something if your book was reviewed in The New York Times Book Review. A Times review imparted a vital existential certification as well as a commercial boost. Is that still the case? Less and less, I believe. The Times in general has lost influence as the paper has receded into parochial, left-liberal boosterism and politically correct reportage. And where its news and comment have become increasingly politicized, its cultural coverage has become increasingly superficial and increasingly captive of establishment, i.e., left-liberal, pieties and “lifestyle” radicalism.

Sure, a positive review in the Times still helps sell books. But it’s quite clear that books from Encounter won’t be getting those reviews, so it is pointless for us to send copies of our books to the Times—worse than pointless, because by so doing we help to perpetuate the charade that the Book Review is anything like even-handed in its treatment of conservative books. There is also this fact: the real impetus in selling books has decisively shifted away from legacy outlets like The New York Times towards the pluralistic universe of talk radio and the “blogosphere.” That is why Encounter can see its books on the Times’s bestseller list without ever making it into the paper’s review columns.

A couple of decades ago, the novelist Charles Simmons wrote a hilarious send-up of The New York Times Book Review called The Belles Lettres Papers. Simmons had been an editor for the Book Review, and he knew the sad, sordid (albeit unintentionally funny) story from the inside. It’s too bad that there isn’t a new Charles Simmons to write an update, showing what happens to a lumbering giant as it lurches further and further into politicized self-righteousness, intellectual mediocrity, and journalistic irrelevance. It might even be worth a book, though not, I’d wager, one that you’d see reviewed in The New York Times.

Roger Kimball
Publisher

It is difficult to single out the most outrageous aspect of Justice Anthony Kennedy’s majority opinion in the Supreme Court’s cataclysmic Boumediene ruling last Thursday: The reckless vesting of constitutional rights in aliens whose only connection with our body politic is their bloody jihad against Americans; the roughshod ride over binding precedent to accomplish that feat; or the smug arrogance perfectly captured by dissenting Chief Justice John Roberts’s description of a “constitutional bait and switch” — a Court that first beseeches the political branches to enact a statutory procedure for handling combatant detentions, and then, once a thoughtful law is compliantly passed, invalidates the effort for its failure to satisfy the eccentric predilections of five lawyers.

And be sure to catch Hugh Hewitt’s excellent After Words interview with Andrew this weekend on Book TV’s After Words:

Upcoming Schedule

	Saturday, June 21, at 10:00 PM
	Sunday, June 22, at 6:00 PM
	Sunday, June 22, at 9:00 PM
	Monday, June 23, at 12:00 AM
	Sunday, June 29, at 12:00 PM

About the Program

Andrew McCarthy, the lead prosecutor against Sheik Omar Abdel Rahmen and the other men responsible for the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993 recounts the case in “Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad.” Mr. McCarthy presents his thoughts on the trial and the current state of the war on terror. Andrew McCarthy discusses his book with Hugh Hewitt, host of the nationally syndicated radio program, The Hugh Hewitt Show and executive editor of Townhall.com.