Woody West

CRANK UP CONSCRIPTION? Of course. On second thought, of course not.

Blood of Victory by Alan Furst Random House, 237 pp., $24.95 IT CAN BE A PLEASING HAPPENSTANCE how one becomes acquainted with an author--a book review, an appealing title perhaps, but more often word-of-mouth recommendation. Until a few months ago, I had not heard of Alan Furst. Then within a…

The Cadence of Grass by Thomas McGuane Knopf, 256 pp., $24 IF A REVIEWER expresses "disappointment" in a book, it is evident that the book's author is going to be roughed up. But if that author has achieved a wide reputation for his craft--and had innumerable literary prizes bestowed upon him--then…

JOSIAH BUNTING III, former enlisted Marine, former Army officer, educator, and novelist and, now, retiring superintendent of the Virginia Military Institute, sounded weary and even plaintive as, once again, he tried to defend the traditions of that state-supported academy. He was reacting to a…

SOME CIRCUMSTANTIAL EVIDENCE is stronger than other, as when you find a trout in the milk--so wrote that old crank Henry David Thoreau. If there's not quite a trout in the suspected biofraud by government biologists studying Canadian Lynx, there surely is a minnow or two in the milk. Not surprising…

SEVERAL AMERICAN EXPATRIATES ARE PASSING THE TIME in a bar in Bangkok, decades after the fall of Saigon. One says he hears that "Brandon Condley is back from...hell, I guess Viet Nam." "I doubt that Brandon Condley will ever get back from Viet Nam," responds another. In Lost Soldiers, his sixth…

HAS THE NAIVE MOOSE popped up on your mental radar? One of the fashionable items on the green agenda, under the rubric of biodiversity, is the reintroduction of species to territory from which they have disappeared—many of them no doubt emigrating to California and Oregon. The reintroduction of…

THE CONTEST wasn't really close: Political sentimentality whipped historical fidelity in a Washington main event. The occasion was the dedication at the FDR Memorial on the Mall of a statue of Roosevelt -- in a wheelchair. The victory was celebrated by Bubba himself on his farewell tour: Bill…

GOING TO LAW, as the phrase used to be -- that is, suing the rascal whose sheep are in your meadow and cows in your corn -- is a hallowed tradition in this land of liberty. In our time, it has become more than a tradition, rather a national pastime, ranking just under baseball and a click above…

STATUS IS the shiniest currency among those who pull the oars of governance in Washington. Their salaries may be a hoot to the Fast Eddies of Wall Street and risible to freshly IPO'd software wizards. The political appointees and the permanent departmental helots in the nation's capital, however,…

The elements are (of course) the federal government, journalism in witless mode, and a public sensibility of such softness that it is not far from emotional rot. Specifically: (1) the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service; (2) the Washington Post; and (3) that excessive public sensibility, alarmingly…

Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen

I DROPPED BY THE OPTICIAN'S the other day to have my glasses powered up since it seemed the newspaper had begun using a much smaller type to print the boxscores. That fairly routine visit, however, produced a head-on cultural collision that left me shaken. An optician's is not the place, you would…

Cormac McCarthy is an odd duck in the literary pond. He appears on no literary panels, sits on none of the bookish juries that parcel out prestige, and is not given to signing petitions to save the sardines. More notoriously, he avoids the press. McCarthy is a novelist who sticks to his lathe --…

J. Anthony Lukas

Thomas Mallon

Like a pop-up target at a carnival shooting gallery, Robert S. McNamara has sharpened the literary marksmanship of writers and critics of the Vietnam war since the 1960s. And with publication last year of his sort-of apologia, In Retrospect, McNamara took as many hits from those on the left as on…

VcKOletta was not a classic GB "swallow," trained to ompromise foreign officials. She was a "sparrow," say, in the sense that the late Evil Empire kept as keen an eye on its citizens as Providence is supposed to on each small bird. Clayton was a target of opportunity, not too swift a boy and…

In a rude time, the notion of American "exceptionalism" has been spun on its axis on campuses and in other closets of higher social criticism. In such precincts, America is portrayed as exceptional usually for its racism and sexism, its economic and social inequities, the scope of its flaws.