A little help for their friends - demise of the New York Times Book Review

National Review, March 7, 1994 by James Bowman

My eight-year-old daughter, confused by her father's reverence

for a Republican President, tried this theory out on me the

other night: "In the old days the good guys were the Republi-

cans; now it's the other way around." "Something like that" was

my parentally evasive reply, as I worried that I had been en-

couraging her to see the world through the categories of a

child---a privilege she will, alas, soon outgrow.

This is the sort of thing that could happen to any of us. In fact, I seem to remember having a similar conversation with my son after incautiously expressing admiration for Grover Cleveland. But in a review with pretensions to academic seriousness it is disastrously out of place.

Or rather, the fact that it is not, so far as Miss Sinkler and her fellow editors are concerned, is very revealing about what academic seriousness means these days. For it seems to be not a disciplined habit of mind but rather an attitude, like the smug yuppie coda to Mr. Delbanco's confirmation to his daughter that the Republicans are now the bad guys: "Not that a clever chap like me thinks in such crude terms," he seems to be assuring us, "but as a rough and ready approximation of the moral order it could be allowed to stand, I thought, for the convenience of an eight-year-old who may one day be almost as brilliant as I am." When the outcome-based review finishes congratulating its right-thinking subject, it proceeds to congratulate its right-thinking self. Welcome to intellectual narcissism; welcome to the Book Review of the Nineties.