'1959: The Year Everything Changed'

This book review appeared in the August 21, 2009, edition of The Metro Herald of Alexandria, Virginia. (Cross-posted from Rick Sincere News and Thoughts of July 23, 2009.)

BOOK REVIEW: WAS 1959 THE YEAR EVERYTHING CHANGED?

Rick Sincere

The Metro Herald

Entertainment Editor

One could forgive a certain solipsism among readers born in 1959 who may think that Fred Kaplan's 1959: The Year Everything Changed is about them personally.

That it turns out not to be so does not diminish the book’s entertaining and informative readability. Yet what it lacks in particular egocentrism (the author himself was born five years earlier) it makes up in idiosyncrasy.

What is most unfortunate about Kaplan’s collection of loosely related essays is that it simply does not live up to its subtitle. Then again, it hardly could, since every year has been (and will be) pivotal in one way or another. Pick a year out of a hat and one could list dozens of discoveries, innovations, inventions, or events that “changed everything.” (1776? The Declaration of Independence and the Battle of Trenton. 1941? Pearl Harbor and Joe DiMaggio’s hitting streak. 1969? The moon landing and Woodstock. Try it yourself.)

What’s more, Kaplan stretches his pivotal year to include events that could properly be placed earlier or later.

Take for example, two scientific advances that truly did have titanic cultural repercussions. These two, in fact, were more influential with regard to how we live now than most any of the cultural, artistic, and political events discussed elsewhere in Kaplan’s book.

Kaplan devotes one chapter, “Toppling the Tyranny of Numbers,” to Texas Instruments’ introduction of the solid integrated circuit (or microchip) at an electronics trade show in March 1959 – even though the invention had been made by John St. Clair Kilby already in August 1958, when he demonstrated it to other TI scientists and executives.

Another chapter, “Andromeda Freed from Her Chains,” is about the birth control pill. Kaplan places this invention in 1959 rather arbitrarily, because the FDA hearing to decide whether to approve the Pill’s use for birth control purposes took place in late December of that year. But the Pill had already been approved for other uses and had been prescribed by physicians for two years by then; its final approval for specific labeling as a birth control drug came on May 11, 1960.

It is hard to imagine a 21st century without microchips – which make possible nearly all the devices that populate our daily lives, including the laptop computer used to write this book review – or the birth control pill, which really did unchain women and free them to pursue happiness and productivity outside of a narrowly defined role as housewife and mother, as well as continuing in that role as a matter of their own choice.

Kaplan may allude to the reasons for his book’s idiosyncratic choices late in its pages when, under the heading of “Acknowledgements,” he writes: “… several years ago, it occurred to me that some of the most important – or at least some of my favorite – books, movies, and record albums were made in 1959. Was this just coincidence, or was there something significant about that year? The more I looked into it, the more it struck me that this truly was a pivotal year – not only in culture, but also in politics, society, race, science, sex: everything” (p. 245).

For all his enthusiasm about “everything,” Kaplan has a crabbed view of society and culture.

For one thing, his book is highly – and almost annoyingly – New York-centric. On page after page, we are introduced to artists, musicians, philanthropists, publishers, and others who live in Manhattan and who meet each other at cocktail parties, jazz clubs, and museum openings.

It is fascinating, of course, to learn that Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage, Ornette Coleman, Allen Ginsberg, and Norman Mailer all traveled in the same circles, and that they and their friends and associates shared ideas, built upon them, and diversified them in their different genres. But Greenwich Village is not the center of the universe; it really isn’t.

Even when talking about arts and culture in New York, Kaplan has a narrow definition of what is important. He devotes two chapters (out of 25) to innovations in jazz by Miles Davis and Ornette Coleman and their associates, but he says virtually nothing about the theatre (on- or off-Broadway). This was the year of Gypsy, for instance, often called the best musical play ever written, and of Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, a pathsetting drama that broke the color barrier on Broadway. Neither are mentioned; nor are the Pulitzer Prize-winning Fiorello! and The Miracle Worker, which made stars of Patty Duke and Anne Bancroft.

Similarly, when he talks about movies, he mentions popular Hollywood films only to denigrate them in passing. He focuses on John Cassavetes’ semi-improvisational film Shadows – shot entirely in New York City -- and suggests (though not in so many words) that it was the first independent (or “indie”) film, which it surely was not. It might have been innovative, but it wasn’t fundamentally so.

Except for a passing reference to the growth of television set ownership over the decade of the 1950s, Kaplan ignores television – as an art form or as a means of communication about news and public affairs – completely.

There are also irritating little slips in the text, some that could have been caught and corrected by copy editors or fact checkers.

In a list of the seven Mercury astronauts, for instance, Kaplan renders Deke Slayton as “Duke Slayton” (p. 73) and, several pages later, he refers to Fidel Castro’s visit to the “Lincoln Monument and Jefferson Memorial” (p. 95). Out of all the structures dedicated to presidents in and around the Nation’s Capital, only one is called a “monument.” Lincoln, Jefferson, and Franklin Roosevelt have memorials. Taft, Wilson, and Theodore Roosevelt have bridges. Reagan has an airport; LBJ has a grove. Washington is the sole president with a monument.

There is also a strange bit of delicacy in his discussion of artists Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, of whom he says: “Soon they fell into an intense relationship, personally and professionally” (p. 174).

Well. In order to find out the whole truth – that they were gay and that they were romantic partners (the latter fact merely implied) – the reader must look up an endnote on page 289. Given that the endnotes are not marked in the conventional way within the text (that is, with a superscripted number to guide the reader to the note), it is unlikely that many will seek out this information on their own. Just whom is Kaplan trying to protect from this common knowledge?

We can grant that Kaplan can, and perhaps should, write about those subjects that most interest him (modern jazz, avant garde art, and Norman Mailer). If he chooses to ignore the wider culture in favor of a more elitist vision of arts, music, and literature, or to treat the rest of America as Saul Steinberg satirized Manhattanites in his famous “New Yorker’s View of the World” cartoon, so be it. That is his privilege as a journalist (and, perhaps, as a Brooklynite).

No matter how you look at it, however, Kaplan falls quite short in making the case for his hyperbolic claim that 1959 was the year that everything changed – or even the year that changed everything.

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

1959: The Year Everything Changed, by Fred Kaplan. Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley & Sons, 2009. 322 pp. (including notes, photographs, and subject index). $27.95.

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

Rick Sincere was born on April 7, 1959, when everything changed for his parents and himself.

It is interesting to note, via a search of Amazon.com that there are other books with similar themes and titles, such as Bernard Diederich's 2007 book, 1959: The Year that Changed Our World, and Rob Kirkpatrick's book, released earlier this year, 1969: The Year Everything Changed, and -- even older -- 1998's What A Year It Was! 1959, by Beverly Cohn.

(Crossposted to Virginia Free Press.)


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VaBook10: Short Takes 4

While I anticipated attending four events at the Virginia Festival of the Book today, in the end I went to just two.

That might sound disappointing, but the two sessions were quite good. In fact, the second -- A Conversation from Left and Right: With Hendrik Hertzberg and Richard Brookhiser -- may have been the highlight of the festival.

That one, sponsored by the Sorensen Institute for Political Leadership at UVA and moderated by its executive director, Bob Gibson, offered a wide-ranging exploration of American governance and constitutional issues that could serve as a model for civil discussion between (as the event's title indicated) "left" and "right."

Here's what Bob Gibson had to say shortly after the program, held in the Culbreth Theatre on the grounds of the University of Virginia, ended:

I was also able to ask the two conversationalists, Hendrik Hertzberg and Richard Brookhiser (both, as Gibson noted, called "Rick"), to give their basic elevator speech about their most recent books.

National Review editor Brookhiser talked about his new memoir, Right Time, Right Place: Coming of Age with William F. Buckley Jr. and the Conservative Movement:

Hertzberg, a senior editor at The New Yorker, spoke with great affection about his new book about Barack Obama, called Obamanos!: The Birth of a New Political Era:

Earlier in the day, at the UVA Bookstore, the producers of the public radio program Backstory: With the American History Guys sponsored a panel featuring three historians. (Like the Virginia Festival of the Book, this radio show is underwritten by the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.)

Tony Field, the show's producer, acted as moderator and said a few words about Backstory for the camera:

One of the panelists was Backstory's "20th Century Guy" Brian Balogh, who teaches at the University of Virginia and is the author of the new book about 19th-century America, A Government Out of Sight: The Mystery of National Authority in Nineteenth-Century America:

A second speaker also wrote a book about the 19th century, though a more discrete segment of it. Attorney David O. Stewart once worked on an impeachment case before the U.S. Senate and has now produced Impeached: The Trial of President Andrew Johnson and the Fight for Lincoln's Legacy:

The third speaker was Guian A. McKee, an historian at UVA's Miller Center for Public Affairs and author of The Problem of Jobs: Liberalism, Race, and Deindustrialization in Philadelphia:

Tomorrow is the last day of the book festival, with twelve programs remaining.

VaBook10: Short Takes 3

On the Third Day of the Virginia Festival of the Book, I found authors in unexpected places.

Attending a session in City Council Chambers called "The Business of Book Reviewing: Changes and Challenges," I caught up with Kristin Swenson, a religious studies professor at Virginia Commonwealth University who is currently a visiting fellow at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities in Charlottesville. I had missed Swenson's presentation on Wednesday about her new book, Bible Babel: Making Sense of the Most Talked About Book of All Time, and thought I had also missed any opportunity to interview her. Fortunately, in asking a question of the panel from the audience, she identified herself by name and I was able to approach her after the program ended to ask her to say a few words about her book.

In addition to a favorable review of Bible Babel by Michael Dirda in The Washington Post, Swenson was profiled in this week's edition of The Hook.

Here is what she said on Friday afternoon:

One of the panelists discussing the business of book reviewing was novelist Katharine Weber, who also has a new book, called True Confections.  She describes it better than I can, as about "race and chocolate and a family business":

Another discussant -- actually the moderator -- on the book reviewing panel was Bethanne Patrick, who is also one of the four guest bloggers for the Virginia Festival of the Book. Bethanne is herself a book reviewer and author of An Uncommon History of Common Things, of Native American Languages, and of a biography of Ulysses S. Grant (focusing on his childhood), as well as a similar book about Abraham Lincoln.

I asked Bethanne to give her assessment of the Festival so far; her enthusiasm shines through her response:

Following the book reviewing panel discussion, I hurried down Market Street through Preston Avenue to Barracks Road (and never making a turn; Charlottesville streets are like that) to attend a presentation by Jag Bhalla at Barnes & Noble about his book, I'm Not Hanging Noodles on Your Ears and Other Intriguing Idioms From Around the World. The Russian expression, "I'm not hanging noodles on your ears," is the equivalent of the English idiom, "I'm not pulling your leg." Bhalla has collected about 1,000 such idioms from ten languages.

Saturday promises to be a busy day at the Festival, with programs beginning in the morning and lasting until early evening.

VaBook10: Short Takes 2

On the second day of the 2010 Virginia Festival of the Book, I was not able to get to as many programs as I planned -- a situation I hope to balance out on Day Three.  With some 300 authors divided up among several venues, it's nearly impossible to get more than a taste of the Festival's many offerings.

Fortunately, I was able to grab two authors and the Festival's program director for short interviews.

Program director Nancy Damon attended a session in Charlottesville City Council Chambers called "Gangs, Schools and the Great American Dream," which was marred by the absence of one of the scheduled authors, Samuel Logan, whose book, This is for the Mara Salvatrucha: Inside the MS-13, America's Most Violent Gang, accounted for the first word in the program's title. I asked her to comment on the 2010 Festival so far:

At that same program, emeritus professor of education at the University of Virginia James M. Kauffmantalked about his most recent book, The Tragicomedy of Public Education, which is so new, he said, that it does not yet appear on the publisher's web site -- nor, it seems, is it yet available on Amazon.com. (Look for it there soon; as you can see from the video, the book is in print and ready to read.)

Earlier in the evening, Escafe restaurant (on the other end of Charlottesville's downtown mall) hosted a reading and remarks by Robert Leleux, author of The Memoirs of a Beautiful Boy, which is about his growing up gay in East Texas and -- he says -- is a comical look at his parents' divorce.

Look for more "short takes" tomorrow, and perhaps some longer-form video reports, as well.

VaBook10: Short Takes 1

Wednesday was the first day of the Virginia Festival of the Book.

I caught two panel discussions at the UVA Bookstore.  After each panel, I asked the participants to speak to the camera and tell me why someone should buy and read their books.

The first was titled "Giants of the Twentieth Century: Ayn Rand and Louis Brandeis," and it featured University of Virginia history professor Jennifer Burns, author of Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right, and Melvin Urofsky, emeritus professor of history at Virginia Commonwealth University and author of Louis D. Brandeis: A Life.

First, Jennifer Burns:

Second, Melvin Urofsky:

The second panel was called "The Crash of '08 and Its Aftermath," with presentations by UVA political scientist Herman Schwartz, author of Subprime Nation: American Power, Global Capital, and the Housing Bubble, and Hunter Lewis, cofounder of Cambridge Associates and author of Where Keynes Went Wrong: And Why World Governments Keep Creating Inflation, Bubbles, and Busts.

Here is Herman Schwartz:

Finally, Hunter Lewis:

I was able to record the whole of the first panel and all but the last five minutes or so of the second. I will be posting those videos here or on my other blog, Rick Sincere News and Thoughts, within the next few days.

On the Eve of VaBook10

Tomorrow is the day logophiles have been waiting for.

No, not St. Patrick's Day, though the Irish are known for their ability to string words together in a mellifluous manner.

Wednesday is the first of five days of the Virginia Festival of the Book, which draws some 20,000 book lovers to Charlottesville in what might be the biggest book festival in the country.

Last week's cover story in The Hook highlighted the "sweet sixteen" programs that that newspaper's editors thought were most interesting.  (At first I thought the cover referred to the NCAA basketball tournament, but luckily I overcame being misled and read it anyway.)  Surprisingly -- or perhaps not -- none of The Hook's top picks are among mine.  That just goes to show the wide variety of authors and books that will be on display at the Festival -- a little something for everyone.

In the run-up to the book festival, WINA-AM's Coy Barefoot and his substitute host on Charlottesville Right Now, Jay James, have been interviewing authors who will be appearing here over the weekend.

On Monday, Coy interviewed Hendrik Hertzberg, who will be appearing on a panel with Richard Brookhiser at the Culbreth Theatre on Saturday, moderated by Bob Gibson of the Sorensen Institute for Political Leadership at the University of Virginia.  Hertzberg is the author, most recently of ¡OBÁMANOS!: The Rise of a New Political Era.  The prolific Brookhiser, who began writing for National Review as a teenager, is the author of Founding Father:  Rediscovering George Washington, and his memoir, Right Time, Right Place:  Coming of Age with William F. Buckley Jr. and the Conservative Movement.  Saturday's panel, entitled "A Conversation from Left and Right: With Hendrik Hertzberg and Richard Brookhiser," promises to be an intellectual feast.

On Tuesday's show, Coy interviewed local political activist David Swanson, who talked about a demonstration against an appearance of law professor John Yoo at the University of Virginia on Friday.  Swanson will also be speaking at a book festival event on Saturday, on the topic Where Does America Go from Here?  Swanson is the author of Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union.

Also on Tuesday, Jay James interviewed VCU professor Kristin Swenson, who will be speaking on a panel at 6:00 p.m. on Wednesday called Bible Babel and Holy Curiosity: Questions and Answers about the Bible. Swenson, who teaches religious studies at Virginia Commonwealth University, is the author of Bible Babel: Making Sense of the Most Talked About Book of All Time.

Last week, Coy interviewed Paul Gaston, professor emeritus of history at the University of Virginia, whose memoir of the civil-rights era, Coming of Age in Utopia, will be featured in a panel on Thursday called "Social Justice: The Power of Individuals."

As for me, I'm looking forward to Wednesday's noon panel at the UVA bookstore, featuring Jennifer Burns, author of Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right, and Melvin Urofsky, author of Louis D. Brandeis: A Life. Urofsky also teaches at VCU, while Burns teaches history at UVA. Urofsky's book is reviewed in the April 2010 issue of Reason magazine by Damon W. Root. (That issue is not yet on line, but Root had a "Hit & Run" blog post on Urofsky's book last September.)  I have already read Burns' book, which was a real page-turner.  It was so interesting, I read every page -- including the footnotes, bibliography, and acknowledgments.

For a full schedule of events at the Virginia Festival of the Book, look here.  Most of the events are free and open to the public.Those with a gaming spirit might want to buy a raffle ticket in hopes of winning one of four exciting prizes; proceeds support the Festival and its programs.

'Ordering the Oceans: The Making of the Law of the Sea'

This book review appeared in the New York City Tribune on Wednesday, November 11, 1987. A somewhat shorter version was published in Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Vol. 16, No, 3 (Winter 1987).

RICHARD SINCERE
An Optimist Looks at the Still-Unratified Law of the Sea


Ordering the Oceans: The Making of the Law of the Sea, by Clyde Sanger, Zed Books, London, $11.50, paperback, 225 pp.

Ocean politics have been at issue at least since the day in 1492 when Columbus set forth from Barcelona in three small ships destined to prove that one could cross the vast Atlantic and return safely.

By the 17th century, ocean politics occupied the minds of sailors, scholars, and statesmen, who all had their own views of what the “law of the sea” should be.

In England, John Selden held that the oceans could be claimed and divided by governments just as land territory was. English monarchs appreciated the idea of extending their sovereignty in this way. Across the North Sea, the Dutch lawyer Hugo Grotius expressed the view that the oceans, beyond a narrow strip along the coasts of countries, belonged to no one and should be free for navigation by all vessels, whatever their ownership. The debate of “mare clausum” vs. “mare librum” was eventually enforced by the British navy, as that state came to see the value of such freedom for a maritime power.

As technology developed and more sovereign states came into being, however, it became clear that the law of the sea as it stood was inadequate to cover the issues of the later 20th century. Exploitation of the continental shelf, conservation of fisheries, and the discovery of mineral resources of the seabed made jurists, diplomats, and businessmen acutely aware of the inadequacy.

In 1958 and 1960 the United Nations sponsored two conferences on the law of the sea, each adding conventions that in part codifies existing customs and in part dealt with the new problems. Yet the effort was incomplete. In 1967, after a famous speech by Malta’s U.N. Ambassador Arvid Pardo that proclaimed the oceans “the common heritage of mankind,” there was set in motion the Third U.N. Conference on the Law of the Sea, or UNCLOS-3.

Sanger’s book concentrates on UNCLOS-3 and discusses in detail the negotiations from 1973 to 1982 that led to the signing of a new, comprehensive Convention on the Law of the Sea. It is a workmanlike book that presents a fairly complete picture, but it is flawed.

The first flaw is this: Sanger, as a Canadian journalist, had special access to Canadian diplomats and politicians who participated in the conference. The irritating result is a painting of the Canadian delegation as the most concerned and most effective of all the participants. Moreover, the Canadians seem to be the saviors of the convention. Whenever an impasse occurs, a clever Canadian comes up with a compromise: the Canadians build bridges and coalitions.

A worse flaw may be Sanger’s bias toward not only supporting the convention as it stands -- a convention that was rejected by the United States, Great Britain, and West Germany -- but a bias against certain changes made during the negotiation process to liberalize the oceans regime, changes instigated by these Western powers.

The reason that these three countries refused to sign the convention was a fundamental disagreement over Part XI, the articles establishing international control of deep-seabed mining in the area outside national jurisdiction. Sanger presents the decisions of these three states as a shortsighted, ideological decision motivated by the lobbying of mining companies that prefer not to be regulated by an international regime.

To Sanger, the problem faced by the industrialized countries had its locus in the provisions for mandatory transfer of technology from mining companies to the International Seabed Authority and thence to the developing nations. What he fails to acknowledge is the damage caused to free enterprise and free trade by the precedent set in this treaty. For the first time an international body is given power to engage in a major commercial enterprise involving valuable natural resources. It is also at the same time both regulator of and competitor with private enterprises (and some state-owned concerns as well). Seafarers may blink at this barnyard metaphor, but a clearer case could not be found: The Law of the Sea Convention puts the fox in charge of the chicken coop.

This is a dangerous precedent and despite all arguments to the contrary, the United States and its allies were right to stand firmly against it.

It was a mistake to negotiate a comprehensive treaty, designed from the outset as a package deal. The one exception -— the international law on the emplacement of weapons on the seabed -— was negotiated separately at the Geneva Disarmament Committee. At UNCLOS-3, the intrusion of Third World ideological considerations could have done considerable damage to the eventual treaty on seabed weapons, what is after all an essentially U.S.-Soviet Union issue and agreement.

Much in the Law of the Sea Convention is in the interests of the United States, and our diplomats should work hard to see that those provisions can be transplanted into another treaty (or treaties). Only the noxious Part XI deserves full-scale rejection.

The Convention has, after four years of being open for signature, still not been ratified by enough countries to enter into force. Perhaps it never will be. I suggest that ten years from now Clyde Sanger publish a second edition of Ordering the Oceans to assess his optimistic predictions. He may be sadly surprised by the course of ocean politics.

Richard Sincere is a Washington-based foreign policy consultant who writes frequently on international affairs.

Books and Authors at CPAC 2010

Last weekend I covered the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington, D.C., for The Metro Herald and for my two blogs, Rick Sincere News and Thoughts and the one you are reading.

Over the two days I was there, I had several opportunities to speak with authors who were selling and inscribing their books for the 10,000 or so attendees from around the United States.

I asked each author to give me an "elevator speech": introduce himself (they all turned out to be male, but that was not by design), describe the book, and explain why a viewer or listener will want to buy the book.

Among the authors I recorded were the chairman of the Cato Institute, Robert Levy; the president of Americans for Tax Reform, Grover Norquist; former White House speech writer Matt Latimer; and 14-year-old wunderkind Jonathan Krohn. You'll see the others in the list below, in alphabetical order.


John Fund, on the revised and updated edition of his book, Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy:

Colin Hanna, president of Let Freedom Ring, on his book Grandma's Not Shovel-Ready!, an illustrated account of the Tea Party 9/12 March on Washington in September 2009:

Jonathan Krohn, the loquacious teenaged author of Defining Conservatism: The Principles That Will Bring Our Country Back:

Former presidential speech writer Matt Latimer has written a memoir about his time in the George W. Bush administration called Speech-Less: Tales of a White House Survivor:

Bob Levy is co-author, with Chip Mellor, of The Dirty Dozen: How Twelve Supreme Court Cases Radically Expanded Government and Eroded Freedom:

Political activist Grover Norquist has written a book about the "Leave Us Alone Coalition" entitled, naturally, Leave Us Alone: Getting the Government's Hands Off Our Money, Our Guns, Our Lives:

Finally, Heritage Foundation constitutional scholar Matthew Spalding is the author of We Still Hold These Truths: Rediscovering Our Principles, Reclaiming Our Future:

VaBook10: Countdown to Virginia Festival of the Book

'Shattered Mirrors,' by Monroe Price

This book review first appeared in The Washington Times on Monday, September 25, 1989.

Can our civil rights survive AIDS?

SHATTERED MIRRORS: OUR SEARCH FOR IDENTITY AND COMMUNITY IN THE AIDS ERA
By Monroe Price
Harvard University Press
$19.95, l60 pages
REVIEWED BY RICHARD SINCERE

In “Shattered Mirrors: Our Search for Identity and Community in the AIDS Era,” Monroe Price, dean of the law school at Yeshiva University, takes an interdisciplinary approach to explore values and behavior during the AIDS years.

Though the topic is specifically AIDS, this slim volume actually contains a wide-ranging reflection upon the sources of contemporary American culture. It also focuses on the contradictory forces that influence our society and the paradoxes that ensue.

Mr. Price argues that AIDS has had an irreversible, if sometimes unapparent, impact upon our culture. To some this might seem to be an irrefutable assertion. Indeed, since millions of people may be carrying the AIDS virus (HIV) and many thousands of those are likely to become ill and die from the disease, the reverberations from AIDS are being felt widely and deeply However, Mr. Price’s argument rests upon an assumption that AIDS, either as an illness or as a social phenomenon, has been much more pervasive than is actually the case.

Because of this faulty assumption, one of the two main themes explored in” Shattered Mirrors” — whether the First Amendment can survive the health crisis — seems misguided. The other major theme, which, appropriately for a lawyer, focuses on the Constitution’s guarantees of equal protection (primarily under the 14th Amendment), travels on much firmer ground.

Mr. Price asserts that “the AIDS crisis has jolted our confidence” in the concept of the marketplace of ideas, which ‘gives the nod to the winner in ideology in cultural styles, and in advocacy of various modes of consumption” (that is, in political speech, artistic and literary speech, and commercial speech). Insofar as this marketplace of ideas is “unfettered, it has produced cultural ideas and habits that are a risk to the public’s health.”

Because the government has seen fit to offer advice and counsel on personal behavior during the AIDS crisis, and may in the future, if it has not already done so, join forces with organized religious groups in an effort to influence cultural norms, Mr. Price believes that First Amendment freedoms of speech and of the press are threatened.

This assertion deserves much scrutiny, Certainly, we already have seen some self-censorship in the media: James Bond has fewer ladies to love, condoms are used to comic effect in movies and on television, rock musicians sing about delaying sexual gratification. There has been, fortunately, no attempt by the state to coerce such censorship. It has been a marketing decision. If Hollywood believes that sex doesn’t sell as well as it used to, let it act on that belief. Hollywood could, after all, be entirely mistaken and too cautious.

The government’s entry into the AIDS debate, and into an educational role (aimed both at children and adults), is not significantly different from the government’s role in public discussions or education on other issues.

To support his assertions that AIDS poses a threat to traditional First Amendment values and protections, Mr. Price invokes an “AIDS-as-war” simile that simply does not wash. AIDS is not comparable to the Black Death, to the influenza epidemic of 1918, or to belligerent attacks by a foreign power. The disease is quite difficult to transmit, far less contagious than influenza or the bubonic plague.

Indeed, the numbers of people affected —at least in the United States, which is the sole focus of this study — are far narrower than such comparisons suppose. There has not been, and if Michael Fumento is correct, there will not be, the long-anticipated breakout of the disease into the larger population beyond the two groups that have been primarily affected, homosexual men and intravenous drug users.

Because of this, however, Mr. Price has a much stronger argument when he says that the AIDS crisis poses a threat to the Constitution’s equal-protection guarantees. Two groups of people, long marginalized by society turn out to be those most affected by a deadly disease. There are attempts by other citizens — including national leaders — to play upon archaic prejudices in order to isolate these groups even more.

Featuring Congressional Record screeds by Rep. William Dannemeyer of California and Sen. Jesse Helms of North Carolina, this movement takes special aim at homosexual men, mostly because — unlike intravenous drug users, who tend to come from the underclass and the politically irrelevant — the homosexual community is large, organized and affluent. To the New Right, the homosexual community and its allies pose a threat to hallowed values. Add to this the hysteria whipped up by political cult leader Lyndon LaRouche, and we have a recipe for a civil-liberties disaster.

These trends explain why, as Mr. Price argues, “one of the greatest dangers of AIDS to the national consciousness is the threat to the principle, so arduously achieved, that baseless discrimination should be officially condemned and that pnvate biases must not have public expression.”

In a passage that has relevance far beyond the realm of public-health concerns, Mr Price notes that “the constitutional notion of equal protection is complex, though the term is often invoked. We do not live in a system in which some constitutional talisman tells us the ‘right’ method of distributing wealth or health.

“Ours is, for better or for worse, s society that presumes, indeed thrives on, inequities that arise not out of the denial of opportunity itself but out of the differences in the way opportunity is seized. We know that the Constitution does not mean that every person will fare equally well, Yet, when we evaluate a course of government action — at least according to Constitutional traditions — we must ask whether a higher level of scrutiny ought to be exercised because of the very nature of the risk groups affected by the AIDS crisis.”

Citing Justice Harlan Stone, Mr. Price asserts that just as racial minorities can be identified if they are targets of discrimination. “those at risk of obtaining AIDS are subject to the kind of ‘prejudice against discrete and insular minorities’ that tends to affect the operation of political processes in a manner contrary to our basic values.” Mr. Price’s warning from all this: “We should be particularly suspicious when government approach disadvantages a group which, for longstanding reasons, those in control of the legislative process may seek to injure.”

As might be expected, Mr. Price praises the recommendation from the Watkins Commission — the President’s Commission on the Human Immunodeficiency Syndrome — that Congress should forbid discrimination against those who have AIDS or who are perceived to carry the AIDS virus. President Bush has endorsed this approach. It has become clear in recent years that AIDS-phobia has been used as a thin veil to justify anti-homosexual discrimination in areas where such discrimination is patently unjustified. (Indeed, one must wonder if it ever is justified.)

While these legal and constitutional issues make up the core of Monroe Price’s book, the author has collected many readable anecdotes, microportraits of our culture on the cusp of the l990s. Although some of his arguments fall short of expectations, Mr. Price raises a number of questions that deserve further exploration. In fact, one could read this book not as a definitive description of “identity and community in the AIDS era,” but as a memorandum of suggestions for future research.

Richard Sincere is a Washington-based issues analyst and writer.

News from the Book Review World

Jordan Michael Smith reports in this week's Jewish Daily Forward that a new book review journal will be launched next week (with February 15 the scheduled publication date).  The new periodical will be called the Jewish Review of Books, and, from the illustration that accompanies the Forward article, it looks like its format and appearance will be much like the New York Review of Books.

Smith writes:

A quarterly magazine devoted to Jewish literary and political affairs, the JRB boasts heavy hitters on its editorial board, such as Michael Walzer, Leon Wieseltier and Ruth Wisse. An oversized, stapled newsprint magazine like the New York Review of Books and The Times Literary Supplement, the JRB will open with an issue that features contributions from Ron Rosenbaum, Adam Kirsch and Harvey Pekar....

Abraham Socher, the editor ... took a leave from his spot as chair of the Jewish studies program at Oberlin College’s department of religion to launch the JRB. He’s both optimistic about the future of journals of ideas and opinions and well aware of the pitfalls that await any print publication in the 21st century.

“Magazines of ideas, which are willing to address a subject at as much length as is called for, which are willing to let writers be writerly, can remain print publications,” Socher said. Those readers attracted to long-form writing prefer to read their lengthier articles in print and are willing to pay for the privilege, Socher believes. “The great threat to print may be a far greater threat to newspapers and news magazines than it is to literary journals, journals of opinions and policy journals,” he said. The print JRB will be complemented by a Web presence before the end of February.

Given today's unsteady, uncertain environment for print media, launching a new publication -- especially a journal of ideas rather than, say, a gossip, sports, or entertainment magazine -- requires a large measure of bravery and even more confidence.  Not to say chutzpah.

(Cross-posted to Rick Sincere News and Thoughts)

A Digression for VaBook10

Let me interrupt the usual format of this web log to point to a couple of exciting (at least from my perspective) developments.

First, the 2010 Virginia Festival of the Book is coming up next month.  From Wednesday, March 17, through Sunday, March 21, dozens of authors representing a wide range of genres will be in Charlottesville (at multiple venues including City Council chambers, various bookstores, and the Culbreth Theatre on the grounds of the University of Virginia) to discuss their books.  Examples include Karen Spears Zacharias, Bob Zellner, and Elizabeth Zelvin -- and those are just the Z's.  (A complete alphabetical listing can be found here, and listings by topic -- crime wave, family, fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and publishing -- are also available.)

It will be my pleasure to be one of four guest book bloggers for the Festival.  The others are Elizabeth McCullough (Cville Words), Bethanne Patrick (The Book Studio), and John Reinhart (Biblio's Bloggins).

I am currently reading one the books whose author will be speaking at the Festival, and I hope to publish a fresh review of that book here soon.

I also hope that, during the Festival, I will be able to conduct short video interviews with some of the authors at the Virginia Festival of the Book, as I did at the National Press Club last November with Frank Aukofer, Joan Biskupic, Ann Coulter, Haynes Johnson, James Reston, Deborah Tannen, Henry Waxman, and others.

For those so inclined, there is a fan page for the 2010 Virginia Festival of the Book on Facebook, and a rather inactive Twitter feed for it, too.  (Don't forget the hash tag, #vabook.)

In other book review news, I will be hosting the Book Review Blog Carnival on March 28.  The current carnival is at Kitsch-Slapped.  The next edition is scheduled to appear on Valentine's Day (February 14) at Mysteries in Paradise.  (The 35th edition of the Book Review Blog Carnival, hosted by Home School Dad, led off with a mention of my review of Rose Marie's memoir, Hold the Roses.)

A news conference to announce some of the events and activities anticipated at the 2010 Virginia Festival of the Book was scheduled for February 10 but postponed because of the inclement weather (that is, the largest snow dump on Central Virginia in recent memory).  It has been rescheduled for February 18 and I plan to be there.

If all goes well, the next post you will find here will be a book review, old or new.