Left Hooks, Right Crosses: A Decade of Political Writing - Softcover

Christopher Hitchens is a contributing editor to Vanity Fair. His numerous books include Letters to a Young Contrarian and Why Orwell Matters.

As television has contributed to the decline in the traditional role of political parties, the broadcast media have gained an advantage over print. Politics is now "talking heads" entertainment with questionable standards. This collection, edited by journalists Caldwell (the Weekly Standard and New York Press) and Hitchens (Vanity Fair and the Nation), brings together three dozen reprinted articles (primarily from the Nation, the Progressive, the Weekly Standard, and National Review) by a variety of skillful writers (journalists, novelists, professors, etc.), such as Nat Hentoff, Tony Kushner, Susan Sontag, Benjamin DeMott, Arundhati Roy, Patrick Caddell, Jonathan Schell, Andrew Sullivan, David Frum, Harvey Mansfield, David Brooks, and Jonathan Rauch. The topics, mostly associated with the political wars of the 1990s, are equally diverse, ranging from personalities (Elian Gonzalez, Monica Lewinsky, Dorothy Day, and Bill Clinton) to issues such as impeachment, civil liberties, mass protests, nuclear weapons, Bosnia, feminism, the Bell Curve, and more. Though the writing is high quality, the brief introductions are weak. Supplied with the twist that Caldwell surveys the liberal articles and Hitchens the conservative ones, they fail to explain the purpose of the collection. In a time of tight library budgets, this is an optional purchase.
William D. Pederson, Louisiana State Univ., Shreveport
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