Word: books
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...group intellectuals known as neoconservatives. Steinfels, who is the executive editor of the Catholic biweekly Commonweal, does not see a neoconservative under every bed. He names only a dozen or so, including Sociologists Nathan Glazer and James Q. Wilson of Harvard and Seymour Martin Lipset of Stanford. But the book centers on three thinkers: Editor Irving Kristol, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Daniel Bell, author of The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. All are associated with The Public Interest and Commentary. Most are professors, including Moymhan, who, Steinfels devastatingly demonstrates, is also an ambitious presidential candidate and an Irish politican...
...conservatives are indeed old, and few, if any, are as young as Neocritic Steinfels, 38. Perhaps comparative youth makes him both shrewd and intolerant. His research is impeccable and his stylistic analysis of the rhetorical devices employed by Kristol and Moynihan is brilliant. For the most part, though, the book remains an ideological paper chase...
...Cornelius Ryan once remarked. In his bestselling World War II trilogy (The Longest Day, The Last Battle, A Bridge Too Far), Ryan, a historian and former wartime correspondent, recounted great battles not through statistics but through narratives of personal sacrifice and drama. In A Private Battle, his last book, Ryan re-creates another kind of war: a four-year fight against cancer. Composed of tapes recorded throughout his illness, along with entries by his wife and co-editor Kathryn, Battle is as much a testimonial to the human spirit as any of his other works...
...told, sink into embarrassed silence, making Ryan feel that he has committed "some unpardonable gaffe." Colleagues and publishers cannot be trusted: "Somebody's bound to say," he notes, " 'Well, we really can't ask Ryan to do this article or count on him to finish this book, because the poor bastard's got cancer.' " Later on, there are the unbearable pain and disfiguring side effects of powerful drugs. Cushing's syndrome, a side effect which Ryan suffered, is particularly excruciating. The face and neck bloat to enormous size, and a small hump appears...
...doctors' diagnoses are the frame work of the Ryans' book. But between them lies the real story: a family's love and strength even as the disease, in Kathryn's words, "strikes and scars them all." The adolescent crises of the Ryans' two children, all but ignored in the face of the family catastrophe, have serious repercussions. Their son Geoff, after experimenting with drugs, runs away from home...