Word: hooks
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Sidney Hook seems to have preserved all and pardoned none -- including himself. If any error occurred in the past, it was duly noted, to be summoned up on some appropriate occasion. Out of Step is the occasion. Hook is currently a senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace in Stanford, Calif. All three subjects are specialties of the man who believes that "the central problem of our time is . . . the defense and enrichment of a free and open society against totalitarianism...
...life in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, discovered aspects of the "Socialist dream" in adolescence and taught philosophy at New York University for more than four decades. There, as in such books as The Hero in History, The Paradoxes of Freedom and Pragmatism and the Tragic Sense of Life, Hook established a well-founded reputation as a secular humanist. He questioned received ideas and challenged those who substituted passion for logic. The professor played no favorites, and few were happy with his investigations. To '30s conservatives, he seemed a Marxist apologist; to '60s New Leftists, he was a cold warrior...
...recalls, "a decisive turning point in my own intellectual and political development . . . I never suspected that ((Stalin)) and the Soviet regime were prepared to violate every fundamental norm of human decency that had been woven into the texture of civilized life." Some friends and colleagues remained lockstep Stalinists, and Hook brings them onstage as object lessons. Lincoln Steffens had famously seen the future in the U.S.S.R. and proclaimed that it worked. It was less well known, notes the author, that Steffens "had previously seen it in Italy . . . where he thought it had also worked. His praise for Mussolini...
...hardly mattered. There were hundreds of other notables to engage the philosopher's attention. Although he was at constant odds with colleagues like Philip Rahv, Mary McCarthy and Dwight Macdonald, Hook was associated with the opinion molders of the Partisan Review, perhaps the closest thing to the claustrophobic Bloomsbury set the U.S. has ever produced. They wrangled over every aspect of politics and culture, and as the memoirs of the survivors show, after a half-century, sentiments have still not cooled. Particularly Hook's, who now regards the Partisans as the "Radical Comedians" because "there was something truly comic about...
...intervals, the author lowers his fists, but much of the anecdota reconsiders a series of onetime celebrities, hacks and propagandists who have long since been swept into the dustbin of history -- with Hook handling the broom. He was performing those janitorial services at N.Y.U., when classes were shut down during a '60s antiwar protest. Hook was an early opponent of U.S. involvement in Viet Nam but characteristically went on teaching. At one session, he recalls, "three raucous S.D.S. students burst into the classroom, shouting 'Strike! Everyone out!' No one moved. I turned and shouted, 'I am placing you under...