An unusual biography cum investigation of an academic caught up in a Cold War controversy. Kirschner (History/Simon Fraser Univ., British Columbia; The Paradox of Professionalism, not reviewed) initially aimed to help his older colleague Halperin (19061995) write his memoirs. But this story of a McCarthy-era political refugee grew, and the author not only incorporates Halperin's memories but applies his own skeptical sleuthing. Though lucidly written, the book's biographical depth may slow readers mainly curious about whether Halperin did spy for Soviets during WW II. Kirschner sketches Halperin's youth in Boston, the son of Yiddish-speaking immigrants, his undergraduate years at Harvard, and teaching stint at the University of Oklahoma, where he became a scholar of Latin America and an ``issue-oriented'' fellow traveler. Halperin was recruited in 1941 as a researcher on Latin America for the federal agency that preceded the OSS and CIA. He went to Boston University in 1949, but in 1953 the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee subpoenaed him, citing testimony by a Soviet courier that he had spied for the Soviets during the war. Halperin took the Fifth Amendment but also denied committing espionage. The author offers intriguing accounts of Halperin's self-imposed exile: five years in Mexico within the community of American expatriate radicals; a three-year stint in the Soviet Union, which soured him on the promise of Communism; a subsequent move to Cuba, where he also concluded that socialism had failed; and his final relocation to Canada—ironically, to a campus seething with socialist slogans. In a final chapter, Kirschner conducts a near-exhaustive lineup of evidence on both sides; he concludes that Halperin was more of an ideologue than he let on and that it ``seems improbable'' that his accuser perjured herself. A minor tale of the Cold War, but well told.
Pub Date: May 10, 1995
ISBN: 0-8262-0989-0
Page Count: 344
Publisher: Univ. of Missouri
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1995
American schools at every level, from kindergarten to postgraduate programs, have substituted ideological indoctrination for education, charges conservative think-tanker Sowell (Senior Fellow/Hoover Institution; Preferential Polices, 1990, etc.) in this aggressive attack on the contemporary educational establishment. Sowell's quarrel with "values clarification" programs (like sex education, death-sensitizing, and antiwar "brainwashing") isn't that he disagrees with their positions but, rather, that they divert time and resources from the kind of training in intellectual analysis that makes students capable of reasoning for themselves. Contending that the values clarification programs inspired by his archvillain, psychotherapist Carl Rogers, actually inculcate values confusion, Sowell argues that the universal demand for relevance and sensitivity to the whole student has led public schools to abdicate their responsibility to such educational ideals as experience and maturity. On the subject of higher education, Sowell moves to more familiar ground, ascribing the declining quality of classroom instruction to the insatiable appetite of tangentially related research budgets and bloated athletic programs (to which an entire chapter, largely irrelevant to the book's broader argument, is devoted). The evidence offered for these propositions isn't likely to change many minds, since it's so inveterately anecdotal (for example, a call for more stringent curriculum requirements is bolstered by the news that Brooke Shields graduated from Princeton without taking any courses in economics, math, biology, chemistry, history, sociology, or government) and injudiciously applied (Sowell's dismissal of student evaluations as responsible data in judging a professor's classroom performance immediately follows his use of comments from student evaluations to document the general inadequacy of college teaching). All in all, the details of Sowell's indictment—that not only can't Johnny think, but "Johnny doesn't know what thinking is"—are more entertaining than persuasive or new.
Pub Date: Jan. 4, 1993
ISBN: 0-02-930330-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The sub-title of this book is "Reflections on Education with Special Reference to the Teaching of English in the Upper Forms of Schools." But one finds in it little about education, and less about the teaching of English. Nor is this volume a defense of the Christian faith similar to other books from the pen of C. S. Lewis. The three lectures comprising the book are rather rambling talks about life and literature and philosophy. Those who have come to expect from Lewis penetrating satire and a subtle sense of humor, used to buttress a real Christian faith, will be disappointed.
Pub Date: April 8, 1947
ISBN: 1609421477
Page Count: -
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1947
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