bookshelf

COMPROMISED CAMPUS

Name: COMPROMISED CAMPUS
Author: Sigmund Diamond
ISBN: 0-19-505382-6

THE COLLOBORATION OF UNIVERSITIES WITH THE INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY, 1945-1955

by Sigmund Diamond ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 1992

bookshelf

A detailed investigation of the extent to which American universities, Harvard and Yale in particular, collaborated with government intelligence agencies in monitoring and suppressing political dissent in the early cold war period. In 1954, Diamond (Sociology and History/Columbia) was fired from Harvard by Dean McGeorge Bundy for failing to show ``complete candor'' about his past association with the Communist Party. The issue resurfaced in 1977 with the publication of Seymour Martin Lipset and David Riesman's Education and Politics at Harvard, which portrayed the university as standing firm against the anticommunist hysteria of the McCarthy period. A long-running controversy ensued when Diamond charged in The New York Review of Books that his experience placed Harvard's integrity on this point in question. Here, Diamond looks beyond his own case to the broader question of how far Harvard and Yale were complicit, despite their official neutrality, in FBI and CIA surveillance and manipulation. The existence is alleged of an ``intelligence-university complex,'' a discreet but active partnership between university authorities and the intelligence agencies. At Harvard, the Russian Research Center was intimately linked with the CIA, Diamond argues, while at both Harvard and Yale the FBI recruited college officials, faculty, and students to inform the agency of any left-tending unorthodoxies in the political views of their fellows. A glittering cast of informants includes Harvard President James B. Conant, Henry Kissinger, and William F. Buckley, Jr. (Buckley is given star billing, with a chapter all to himself describing how he could not find God at Yale, but found J. Edgar Hoover instead). Diamond's evidence is carefully assembled, and much of it comes from the FBI's own files, despite the limitations of the Freedom of Information Act. (The book is interesting for its account of these censorship difficulties alone.) Persuasively argued and thoroughly documented, this is clearly no mere set of unfounded allegations.

Pub Date: May 1, 1992

ISBN: 0-19-505382-6

Page Count: 416

Publisher: Oxford Univ.

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1992

Categories:

GENERAL NONFICTION

bookshelf

NUTCRACKER

by E.T.A. Hoffmann ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 28, 1996

bookshelf

This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)

Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996

ISBN: 0-15-100227-4

Page Count: 136

Publisher: Harcourt

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996

Categories:

GENERAL NONFICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE NUTCRACKER AND THE MOUSE KING
by E.T.A. Hoffmann ; adapted by Natalie Andrewson ; illustrated by Natalie Andrewson

- BOOK REVIEW
THE NUTCRACKER
by E.T.A. Hoffmann & illustrated by Julie Paschkis

bookshelf

TO THE ONE I LOVE THE BEST

EPISODES FROM THE LIFE OF LADY MENDL (ELSIE DE WOLFE)

by Ludwig Bemelmans ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 23, 1955

bookshelf

An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.