Category: Books

Exact Change, 1992
After slogging my way through these collective writings of de Chirico, I have decided that out of all the surrealists and proto-surrealists, this man comes as close to my own artistic aesthetic.
Not that I would have known from the title work, a novella called “Hebdomeros,” the only novel he wrote, a completely mad and dreamlike work that did not seem to come from the same artist, the man who painted empty plazas full of long shadows, statues, and mannequins.
For “Hebdomeros” is full of people. No real characters, save the title man, who is a wilder version of de Chirico, and who is somewhat of a painter, an artist, but who travels through the novel in and out of linear time, dreamstate, and textual reality.
It’s a work comprised of long, unweildy sentences that shift subject matter while you read them. “Dreamlike” has never been a truer description, as scenery shifts (though confining itself to hotel rooms, seaside towns, countrysides, and piazzas) along with characters. Yet nothing in “Hebdomeros” is reminiscent of de Chirico’s paintings, which is quite notable–he didn’t see the work as an extension of his painterly concerns.
This is made obvious with the other works that make up the second half of this book from Exact Change. Here we have a two rough sketches, warm-ups for the novel, written in similar (and equally confusing) style; Three stories containing a character called “Monsieur Dudron,” in which the narrative is more traditional and where we are alerted of shifts in dreamstate; and then a series of attempts at a manifesto, where the more familiar elements of deChirico’s paintings finally turn up–the statues, the lonely square, the banners and flags seen over the tops of buildings, the allusions to Homer and Ulysses; and two critical appraisals, one of New York City, and one of the painterCourbet. DeChirico admired the realists, but was in search of realistic solutions to Nietzchian revelations (“Ecce Homo” being a favorite philosophic text). When deChirico describes his paintings, he adds sound, so next time you see those banners over his walls, there’s a flapping, cracking sound to be heard.
I share some of his feelings, particularly the “nostalgia of the infinite,” by which he means, I believe, that sense of sadness and mystery when looking at things far away or hidden behind a wall, such as his flags or passing trains.

Sometimes the skyline is blocked by a wall behind which rises the whistle of a locamotive, or the clank of a departing train: all the nostalgia of infinity is revealed to us behind the geometrical precision of the square.

My childhood was often spent in the backyard of my house wondering what lay beyond the high fence at the top of the hill that bordered our property. Of course, I could have taken the road up and around to discover that, but it would have been different. De Chirico understands the same thing: the train seen at a distance is different from the same train seen up close. He wants to recontextualize things, much like the later Surrealist and Pop Artists did: he thought it a splendid enigma to put furniture in the middle of roads, or forests. He toys with the idea of placing statues of men in bedrooms, or sitting in chairs looking out windows.
Soon after his classic period, de Chirico tried to become a classicist (figures!) and got denounced by the artists around him. He wound up signing his work “The Greatest Painter” and making counterfeits of his old work. Oh dear.
The book taxed my vocabulary, which I consider pretty broad. For your fun and pleasure, I include a short list of words I had to go look up.
Parthenonize, pedagogize, ephebogogize, megaron, ithyphallic, hypostases, telluric, peristyle, amphorae, cholagogic, “acquae calidae”, ogival, littoral, hygrometrically, clepsydra, catafalque, vernissage, Alpheus, Thermopylae, ephebes, lacustrine, “lares and penates”, “Rialto bridge”, Quiberon, boreal, Zouave, deliomaque, Dioscuri
He also mentions artists and poets I didn’t know:
Etienne Spartali, Pandolfo Colenuccio, Corot, Poussin, Louis Le Nain, Zrzavy
If I was paid to write this, I would use Merriam-Webster and link to all these, but in this world you’re on your own.

Puffin, 1983
Here’s a secret about my married life: Jessica likes to be read to. Something about my deep, sonorous (read: monotone) voice comforts her at bedtime and sends her right off. While she spends her own reading time either in magazines or on a few books (right now it’s some Buddhist text), we use the reading time to check out children’s literature. (They’re quick to get through, and fun to read out loud. Not like, say, Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections.)
It was a sad fact that I never read “Winnie-the-Pooh” until I read it to Jessica, although by that time I enjoyed all of its nuances and Milne’s effortless style.
I picked up “The Witches” the other day for 50 cents, and that became our new book.
First of all, this is a great book for reading out loud. With The Grand High Witch, parents and other readers can indulge in their vurrrrrrrst German accent, as Roald Dahl envisions a witch not as a cackling crone, but as a half-zombie She-Wolf of the SS. The witches’ grand plan to exterminate all children is not far indeed from Hitler’s “Final Solution,” and the mice/vermin parallel is well taken.
Dahl creates a hero who gets turned into a mouse half-way through and doesn’t get turned back into a boy. He very cleverly reverses the “coming of age” trope – by getting smaller and becoming unhuman, the hero grows up and realises his destiny. There’s also a penultimate chapter where the mouse-boy realises that he won’t live that long, being a mouse and all, but as he loves his dear old grandmamma, they will grow old together. It’s a weird, mortality-filled chapter that made Jessica ask, “Is this book really for kids?” (Don’t ask me, I’m still getting over the recent shock of my first read of The Velveteen Rabbit. Talk about traumatizing a child.)
Dahl is a devious genius, and his bile is well placed. There’s no coddling here, with witches not just seeing children as nuisances, but as things needing to be eradicated. There’s no witches with hearts of gold, or witches to be fooled, they are just there to kill children. That’s it. Refreshing, indeed.

Doubleday, 2003
Okay, you’re kidding, right? This is the most popular fiction book for months and months? Once again I find my enduring faith in the American public severely tested by this fact. Dan Brown’s thriller about a search for the Holy Grail succeeds in being a page-turner, but little else. His two lead characters, Robert Langdon, a Harvard professor of religious symbolism; and Sophie Neveu, a French detective specializing in cryptologist, exist to lead the reader through the web of Grail facts, but appear to have little else. I can’t tell you anything about Langdon except his field of study. Neveu’s character is sketched in more, because it’s the murder of her grandfather that sets the story on its way.
Halfway through, I realised why this book is so popular. Brown treats his audience not exactly as idiots, but as blank slates who know nothing of art, of Europe, of history, of even the most rudimentary conspiracy theories (quite amazing post X-Files). The non-divinity of Jesus, the resuscitation of Mary Magdalene from whore to feminine equal, and the question of a J+M bloodline, may curl the hair of the fundies and intrigue the pop-Christians in the general public (who freely mix their Bible, “angel cards”, and astrology charts), but for any half-serious biblical scholar or, really, anyone whose been around the block a few times, it’s nothing that new. And to then have to read it all in Brown’s pedantic style is a bit much.
Here’s a typical Brown passage:

The agent signaled to an insulated wire that ran out of the back of the computer, up the wall, through a hole in the barn roof. “Simple radio wave. Small antenna on the roof.”
Collet knew these recording systems were generally placed in offices, were voice-activated to save hard disk space, and recorded snippets of conversation during the day, transmitting compressed audio files at night to avoid detection. After transmitting, the hard drive erased itself and prepared to do it all over again the next day.

All he really has to tell us is that some offices are bugged and that this is where the info is collected. Brown backs up to fill us in on details such as these all the time, with awkward dalliances into art history, architecture, theology, and more. They aren’t exactly woven into the narrative as much as they’re pasted in. Brown’s authorial voice is like a trivia buff at a cocktail party, telling you the history of the martini you’re drinking, or when pimento olives became popular.
On top of that, there’s the inner thoughts of the characters that sum up the action and major plot points for those who haven’t read many books before and/or who suffer from short-term memory loss. “I’m about to dash out of the Louvre…a fugitive.” (after about 50 pages that demonstrates this.) And my favorite: “Accompanying the gravity of being a hunted man, Langdon was starting to feel the ponderous weight of responsibility, the prospect that he and Sophie might actually be holding an encrypted set of directions to one of the most enduing mysteries of all time.” Yes, yes, yes. We know!
I am interested in seeing how this is all going to play out when the film adaptation comes out. With mainer-than-mainstream director Ron Howard handling it, will they water down the crux of the plot, that Jesus was mortal and fathered a child? Will the fundies go and picket? Will they issue a jihad against Brown? Should anyone who lives in a secular nation and has an ounce of common sense care?
Meanwhile, I wrote about TDVC for my book column (I was shorter and nicer than above), and included a parody. Enjoy.

THE DELI CODE
Robert Langdon entered the delicatessen on the corner of Rose and Crucian Streets. Langdon knew the deli had been at the downtown location for over three years. Before that it had been Willie’s, a mid-level bistro for eight years. Before that it had been Ella’s Haberdashery and Lightbulb Emporium.
“What kind of sandwich would you like, sir?” asked the girl at the register.
Robert Langdon knew about sandwiches. It was known by scholars that the food item was named after John Montagu, the fourth Earl of Sandwich. In 1762, the earl had asked for some meat to be served between two slices of bread in order to avoid interrupting his gambling game.
Yet the question still remained of the meat and the type of bread that Langdon, over 200 years later, would be asking the deli to assemble.
“What do you recommend?” Langdon asked, tactically.
“Pastrami on rye is popular,” said the girl, as her dark brown eyes sized him up.
Pastrami had long been a staple meat of the Italians. Before the advent of refrigeration in the 20th century, large amounts of beef were soaked in brine, then smoked, in a process known as “curing.”
Bread, on the other hand, had been around since the time of the Egyptians, and was commonly made from a dough of ground or milled cereal grain, usually wheat flour, and leavened by chemical or microbiological action. Rye bread was a combination of wheat and rye flours, giving a loaf a lighter texture than the pure rye bread known as pumpernickel.
“That sounds fine,” said Langdon.
“One pastrami on rye!” the girl suddenly shouted to an unseen person in the back.
I’m about to eat a pastrami on rye sandwich, thought Robert Langdon.
[That’s quite enough. – Ed.]

Most of you readers don’t know that I write a book club column for the Santa Barbara News-Press. I’m not personally in, or have ever been in, a book club, and so it’s all pretty new to me. I am very aware, though, of how similar most clubs are. They have all read The DaVinci Code by Dan Brown, and, after hearing good and bad things about it, I picked it up at the library on “Express Loan”. I’ve dropped all my other reading to blast through this in a couple of days, at the end of which I will have some sort of opinion.
I’ll let you know soon…

Vintage, 1953
About as long as a good-sized New Yorker essay, Eugen Herrigel’s book about his many years as a German studying Japanese archery (kyudo) and Zen comes recommended by a struggling Zen friend as a good primer (along with the longer and unread “Three Pillars of Zen” by Phillip Kapleau Roshi). And in a Zen-like moment, I found it exactly when I wasn’t looking for it in Book Den used books (or was that a Tao moment?).
Zen is the most mindbending of philosophies, and Herrigel’s struggle to master his chosen art is full of, well, such moments. His sensei, Kenzo Awa, offers little explanation, but guides his students through a series of failures and frustrations, so that the proper way of doing anything comes as a much larger enlightenment. When, after many years (years!) Herrigel starts to hit the target, Sensei chides him for any satisfaction: “What are you thinking of? You know already that you should not grieve over bad shots; learn now not to rejoice over the good ones. You must free yourself from the buffetings of pleasure and pain, and learn to rise above them in easy equanimity, to rejoice as though not you but another had shot well.”
The importance of meditation, and of ceremony, of what sports-type secular people call being in the zone, before engaging on a work of art, is part of the Zen experience too. It is the most purpose-filled arts (swordsmanship, painting, archery) that Zen requires to be approached with purposelessness. It’s very difficult to comprehend, but Herrigel does his best.
Herrigel’s wife, too, spends her five years learning the art of Japanese flower arranging, and goes on to master Zen in her own way. Herrigel doesn’t say much about her, which says something about the times and his attitudes. These days, the book would have to be about both husband and wife, I suppose.
Over at Amazon, the book gets good ratings, apart from some kyudo expert called Earl Hartman, who feels the whole book is a sham.

To put it bluntly, Herrigel got everything, and I mean everything, wrong. He himself only practiced kyudo for three years, if his translator Sozo Komachiya is to be believed (he started in 1926 and returned to Germany in 1929). He spoke no Japanese. He was himself a mystic (or he wanted to be one, anyway) intent on understanding Zen, not archery, and he had very definite pre-formed ideas about what he was looking for and what he believed Zen, and, by extension kyudo, to be. Given such a situation, the impending disaster was a forgone conclusion. Even with the best instruction he would not have understood kyudo.
His book is very seductive, filled as it is with tantalizing mystical stories about a seeker on the road to “enlightenment”. So, it will appeal to romantics who have no experience in either Zen or kyudo, and it has been my experience that the book indeed appeals primarily to such people. It is instructive to note that those people who have experience in either discipline are quick to point out how thoroughly Herrigel bollixed it up.

Gosh. Well, that’s that then.

Penguin, 1982
I found the Tao of Poo at our library’s used book corner for 50 cents. I’ve been interested in Benjamin Hoff’s thesis since reading the Pooh books in ’99–that the ineffable Pooh-bear embodies Taoist principles. Pooh just “is”, and hence lives life peacefully unlike negative Eeyore, busybody Rabbit, or overly intellectual Owl.
This would have made a good little book, or a comic. But Hoff pushes the similarities to their limits, and finding them wanting fills the book with stories from Lao Tzu and other philosophers and his own diatribes against modern society. Pooh gets a bit diminished throughout, and by including large chunks of Milne’s text, it plainly shows up Hoff’s own writing as plain. He’s not that good, either, at mimicking Milne’s voice, so his conversations with Pooh ring a bit false. Probably better than the Disney atrocity, but still not quite there.
However, the first chapter helped me understand the difference between Buddhism, Confusianism, and Taoism. In it, Hoff relates the story of the Vinegar Tasters, a scroll painting. One man tastes the vinegar and has a bitter look on his face, another has a sour look, and the third has a smile. The first man, Hoff says, represents Buddhism, who sees life as suffering and bitter. The second represents Confucius, who sees life as sour, not like it was in the old days, and sees that living life according to the old ways will help it return. The third man, the Taoist, sees the vinegar as vinegar and appreciates that it tastes just as it does. He sees life as trying to understand and appreciate the essence of all things.
Well, that’s my version of Hoff’s version, written from memory, but nothing else that follows in the Tao of Pooh had quite that effect. By the third chapter I began to feel dissent from his lecturing. Of course we can’t all be like Pooh–he lives in the 100 Acre Wood, and is not subject to the forces of capitalism. He always has a steady supply of honey, pays no rent, and…well, you see how it doesn’t exactly fit. If I kept turning up at people’s homes looking for “a little smackerel of something,” then I’d be called a freeloader.
Chapters are loosely based around a character from the books and how they stand for fallible human traits and in opposition to Pooh. Hoff especially has it in for Rabbit, but then Rabbit is the meanest character in the Pooh stories, always trying to evict newcomers to the forest.
Anyway, a quick read and not a totally enjoyable one. I don’t feel much of a Taoist afterwards, but I do feel an urge to go back to the Pooh books.

Dell Rey, 1971 edition
When my family first moved to England, we stayed in the village my dad and mom grew up in. (No, this story is not about how I met Cthulu.) I went to that village’s library only once I believe. It was about the size of a closet. The book I checked out was an H.P. Lovecraft collection. Only upon getting it home did I read the fine print and found that it was a selection of his unfinished tales, posthumously completed by various (lesser) writers. Feeling gypped, I didn’t make it past the first couple of pages. (I probably also found it boring).
I was a horror fan when I was a teenager, so it’s surprising that I never got around to Lovecraft until now, especially since I was going beyond Stephen King and reading things like Ramsey Campbell and Clive Barker (when he only had Books of Blood to his name).
Lovecraft has always felt to me like the fine single malt whiskey of horror writers. There’s no detours into humor, nothing playful, no experiments in style. Just madness and horror. (Much like Glenlivet). And indeed that’s how it should be. I takes a few stories to get into his prose and his rhythms, but once inside you begin to appreciate the fine detail and the slow pace. You want to roll the paragraphs around on your tongue and savor it.
Maybe it was my associations with that early library book, but I for a long time thought that HPL was British. I guess I was confusing him with M.R. James (who I still haven’t read–these two authors are high on the list of Mark E. Smith of the Fall, so from him my Lovecraft interest was piqued).
What I didn’t expect was how so many of the tales in this collection come from an anxiety over evolution and miscegenation. Apart from Chthulu and creatures that live in another dimension (“Beyond the Wall of Sleep”, “The White Ship”, “From Beyond”), the monsters that stalk these tales are often the result of some long past intermingling of man and beast. More often than not, they come to resemble our evolutionary relatives, the monkey (“The Lurking Fear,” “Arthur Jermyn”) and the fish “The Shadow over Innsmouth”, “Dagon”). Both narrators in “The Lurking Fear” and “Innsmouth” fear and are repulsed by the inhabitants of the out-of-the-way villages they stay in–who are initially presented as sloping-foreheaded inbred yokels (the phrase “white trash” pops up twice here, and HPL was writing in 1920-1930 or so) until the true magnitude of their breeding is revealed.
But the true horror that Lovecraft finishes on is not death, but the realization of the narrators that they too are somehow linked to this nefarious family tree. Arthur Jermyn sets himself on fire when he realizes that his grandmother was some sort of albino ape-thing; the narrator of “Innsmouth”, after escaping the fish-people in the town, slowly comes to realize that he is part of them, and his fate comes as a degenerative or evolutionary illness. We have found the monster and he is us.
After reading these dozen tales, it’s easy to see why filmmakers have found Lovecraft so hard to adapt. The narrators are usually solitary souls, and the action is usually of the slow, creeping kind. The “monster,” if there is one, only shows up on the last page, if at all, and by this time the narrator is usually at a loss to describe the indescribable. Plus there’s no guns or boobs. However, Lovecraft would work well as radio monologues–radio being the perfect format for “the unnamable” (and I’m not talking about Rick Dees). I wonder if that’s ever been done?
For a good website about the man and his works check out the H.P. Lovecraft Archive.

“On The Road” Manuscript. 120 feet long. Single-spaced, typewritten manuscript held together with tape. Written in three weeks while on a coffee and Benzedrine high. Sold for a record $2.43 million at Christie’s. Purchased by Indianapolis Colts’ owner, James Irsay.
Blimey.
KEROUAC MANUSCRIPT

Durant: Time Reading Program, 1933 (this ed. 1963)
Dunham: Alfred A. Knopf, 1964
Blimey. Four months it’s taken me to get through these two tomes, both histories of the Western world with a focus on philosophy. I never took Philosophy in college, and up to now my knowledge was primarily focused on post-modernism and existentialism, with my history supplied by Monty Python’s Philosopher’s Song.
I first started on Will Durant’s text after having it recommended by Jon, and then finding a cracking good paperback version (Time Reading Program, with a thick, card-like cover and a nice chronology inside–great paper too) in a used bookstore in Ventura. I jumped right in–Plato, I believe it was–and when my other friend Mr. C______ heard I was reading Durant, I soon received his well-read copy of Barrows Dunham’s “Heroes and Heretics,” because “If you’re going to read a history of philosophy, you should at least choose one that’s good.” So sayeth Mr. C.
Durant’s book is still in print. You can find new copies in Borders, as well as used ones everywhere, from yellowing, 1970’s Pocket Book editions, to well-underlined student copies. He, along with his wife Ariel, also put out a Story of Civilization in 11 volumes that is gathering dust over at Thrasher Books. What an undertaking that would be.
Dunham, on the other hand, is unknown to us these days. He a socialist/communist, was persecuted by the McCarthy hearings in the late ’50s, and subsequently lost his professorial position at Temple due to it. (Twenty-six years after a federal court dismissed the charges Temple restored his pension, which they had blocked all that time). All his major works are out of print–including “A Giant in Chains” and “Thinkers and Treasurers”–but during his day he was a big friend of the left, and wrote poetry in his early days, as well as corresponding with Dashiell Hammett among others).
I read these books parallel to each other, with a chapter in Durant on Voltaire being followed by Dunham’s take on the man. There wasn’t an exact one-to-one correspondence, and often I was with Dunham for a long period before Durant was even in the same century.
Let’s have a closer comparison, and break down these books:
Will Durant focuses on philosophy, and just the philosophy, ma’am. He doesn’t have any time for Christianity, which he sees as a sort of Orientalist philosophy of resignation brought in around the downward spiral of the Roman Empire. Christianity, to Durant, is all about giving up making a change in this world and pinning all your hopes on the next. Not any way to live, he thinks.
Here’s Durant’s TOC:
Plato. Aristotle. Bacon. Spinoza. Voltaire. Kant. Schopenhauer. Spencer. Nietzsche. Henri Bergson. Benedetto Croce. Bertrand Russell. George Santayana. William James. John Dewey.
Notice that little jump of, say, 2,000 years between chapters 2 and 3. Hegel gets a look in at the end of the chapter on Kant (mostly to point out that if you think Kant is unreadable, wait until you get a load of this guy.) The last 6 are Durant’s choice of modern European and American philosophers, of which probably Russell and Bergson continue to pull some weight. Durant wrote this book in the aftermath of World War One, and doesn’t hint at the war to come.
Interestingly, he ends with a oblique critique of American consumerism:

No doubt we have grown faster than nations usually have grown; and the disorder of our souls is due to the rapidity of our development. We are like youths disturbed and unbalanced, for a time, by the sudden growth and experiences of puberty. But soon our maturity will come; our minds will catch up with our bodies, our culture with our possessions. Perhaps there are greater souls than Shakespeare’s, and greater minds than Plato’s, waiting to be born. When we have learned to reverence liberty as well as wealth, we too shall have our Renaissance.

If you’ve been to Wal-Mart recently, or up to Rodeo Drive, we haven’t matured yet. In fact, we’re probably regressing.
Of all the philosophers in the book, I believe it’s Voltaire that’s closest to his heart. Building on Francis Bacon’s thrill of coming out into the Renaissance light and wanting to write about everything, Voltaire not only does that, but carouses with the low- and the high-lifes of his time, is in and out of prison, falls in love with a beautiful, intelligent woman, and ends his days returning to Paris as a celebrity of sorts. What’s not to love? After that philosophy becomes a game for miserable academics like Schopenhauer, who thought women were out to get him, and loonies like Nietzsche. Only Russell and Dewey come off as sensible in the last couple of chapters. He certainly isn’t too fond of Kant, and tries not to quote him at all, using the excuse, “Kant is the last person in the world that we should read on Kant.” (Though he’s probably right).
Closest to Dunham’s heart is the pre-Christian Jesus–“the leader of an armed movement for national liberation” as he refers to him–and Joan of Arc, who saved the ass of the King of France and the country itself, led the people to battle, and then ran rings around the Inquisition before being burned at the stake sometime around her 19th birthday. Quite tough competition for any high schooler.
Dunham, who faced the Inquisition of McCarthy, obviously sees a kindred spirit in her, and his writing does her justice. His chapter on her is as good as his chapter on Jesus, at that is one of the best, as an atheist, I’ve ever read.
But let’s step back and look at Dunham’s list of “Heroes and Heretics,” for as you see, Joan was no philosopher, but she changed the world.
Akhnaton. Socrates. Amos. Jesus. Paul. Marcion. Arius. Athanasius. Pelagius. Zosimus. Vincent. Abelard. Arnold of Brescia. The Cathari. The Waldo. Duns Scotus. John Wyclif. William Tyndale. Joan of Arc. Erasmus. Luther. Calvin. Marc Antonio de Dominis. Copernicus. Bruno. Descartes. Spinoza. Hobbes. Locke. Voltaire. Diderot. De Prades. Kant. Cardinal Newman. John William Colenso. Darwin. Marx. Lincoln. Eugene Debs.
Some of these names will be familiar, some are terrifically obscure. Compiling this list (because it is not determined by chapter headings) I came across some I had completely forgotten. Some heretics disappear in time. Other heretics change the world.
I can’t say I was too interested in the section after Paul up to the Enlightenment, for men arguing over the minutiae of a text that was never meant to undergo any sort of logical scrutiny has little worth in my eyes. It is surprising that Dunham dwells on this part of history (the part Durant ignores) after proclaiming himself an agnostic. But he is studying a system and needs the evidence.
This is a book that is not just a history of heresy, but a book that examines the process of heresy and orthodoxy. Philosophy is usually heresy because it is responding to an unjust orthodoxy.
Dunham’s writing soars and plunges where Durant’s just coasts. He’s also quotable. Take this section from his chapter on Luther:

But there are two ways of judging ideology to be important, and they differ as excuse differs from justification. You can invent a doctrine as a public cover for policy, the policy and its motives being of main concern; or, having accepted doctrine as true, you can deduce policy from it. In the first case, doctrine is something specious and ad hoc: the normal relation of theory and practice is reversed, and instead of theory’s giving rise to practice, practice gives rise to theory in the form of apologetics. In the second case, doctrine behaves honestly: it is theory enlightening practice by supplying the means to know and the wisdom to choose.

He is writing about Luther here (an example of the second case), but he is also talking about the two types of government. It’s something Chomsky would write; it certainly describes the Neo-cons and their policies.
Sections like this as scattered throughout, as are fabulous epigram-like sentences. “Government is legalized violence, and science is peaceful understanding,” is one of them.
Of America (the focus of his last chapter) he paints the country as a land created entirely by heretics, but also one that oscillates between the Bill of Rights and the Witch Hunt. The pragmatism in the middle is our strength and our weakness. “…whether [Americans] are dispossessing a slave owner or putting a socialist in jail, it is all on behalf of liberty.” Indeed.
Dunham published this in 1964, two years after the Cuban missile crisis. Staring death in the face along with the rest of the world, as well as having stared down the House Un-American Activities Committee, Dunham passes into an optimism that many “survivors” have. In a way, “Heroes and Heretics” is Dunham’s “survivor’s tale.”
He ends with this:

…I do not share the existentialist pessimism which advocates surrender before attempt. We know our future to be uncertain, but more than this we do not know. Where nothing is certain, nothing is doomed, and accordingly we may explore with some confidence certain very attractive possibilities: an abundant life, a peaceful world, all blessings shared with all men. If such tasks seem above our powers, why, so seemed the tasks of every age to the people of it. They grew, however, equal to their tasks–and so can we. While friends are warm and grandsons are glorious, I cannot think the growth will fail. For we are to become (it will be remembered) ‘lords and possessors of nature’–lords also and possessors of ourselves.

This is a terrific book. It should be back in print, even if he is a heretic.
(Thanks to Mr. C for the long loaner! I hope I’ve done the book justice.)