Shelf Life. - reviews of three political books - book review

National Review, May 20, 2002

The Thernstroms have done it again. In Beyond the Color Line: New Perspectives on Race and Ethnicity in America (Hoover Press/Manhattan Institute, 438 pp., $19.95), scholars Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom have edited an important collection of 25 essays on race in America; as we have come to expect from this redoubtable husband-and-wife team, the overall effect of the scholarship is to challenge the sacred cows of contemporary liberal race talk.

Against the hyperventilations of race rhetoric, the book's contributors erect a sturdy edifice of fact and common sense. In her own essay, Abigail Thernstrom details the racial gap in academic performance -- and takes heart in the fact that school reformers are finally focusing on the crucial K-12 years. James Q. Wilson, in an essay on race and crime, says that cities are safer than they used to be, and predicts that if crime rates continue to slide, "the issue of police 'profiling' black persons will slowly disappear." The last word goes to California crusader Ward Connerly, who says that getting rid of divisive affirmative-action preferences is the only way we can "rededicate our nation to the principle of equality and bring social peace and harmony to America."

The Thernstroms' anthology deserves the attention of anyone who cares about promoting racial harmony, but will be especially helpful in college courses, as a counterweight to the reigning platitudes.

n William F. Buckley Jr.: A Bibliography (ISI, 316 pp., $29.95), edited by William F. Meehan III, will be a valuable tool for historians. It provides a comprehensive index to a half-century's worth of writings by WFB on -- well, on everything. Leafing through the name index gives some idea of the diversity: Robert McNamara is followed by 1960s segregationist Lester Maddox, who is followed in turn by James Madison; National Review senior editor Ramesh Ponnuru jostles Cambodian tyrant Pol Pot; NR editor-at-large John O'Sullivan is sandwiched between Jose Ortega y Gasset and Lee Harvey Oswald. Not a restful 50 years, to be sure, but never dull.

n Lynne Cheney has just written a children's book, America: A Patriotic Primer (Simon & Schuster, 40 pp., $16.95), and I strongly recommend it as a first book about America for young children. The book has a very large format and an extremely busy and colorful layout, but the principles kids will learn from it are simple and eternal. Here's one example of its alphabetic lessons: "E is for Equality. The Declaration of Independence established the principle that all are created equal and have God-given rights to live, to be free, and to pursue happiness. Over the years, more and more of us have been able to enjoy these rights equally."

In her introduction, Cheney describes the book's animating idea:

Mary Antin [an immigrant from Russia] . . . described in a book the ongoing amazement she felt at having become an American. One day, she wrote, she learned about George Washington, and suddenly she realized, 'I was more nobly related than I had ever supposed. . . . George Washington, who died long before I was born, was like a king in greatness, and he and I were fellow citizens.' Mary Antin's book is called The Promised Land, and there are many reasons that so many people from so many countries have looked on the United States in this way. We should all commit ourselves to seeing that the children of this blessed country understand these reasons from their youngest years.

Lynne Cheney has long been prominent as a conservative polemicist; but this is a book that can be embraced by Americans of all political persuasions.

-- Michael Potemra