Left Hooks, Right Crosses: A Decade of Political Writing
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.,  ShreveportCopyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.