Look Homeward America: In Search of Reactionary Radicals and Front-Porch Anarchist
*Starred Review* "I am an American patriot," Kauffman begins, and after less than a paragraph of his customary fine, funny, dead-on-the-money phrasing about what that entails, does his first finger-pointing at role models: "I am the love child of Henry Thoreau and Dorothy Day." Dorothy who? (Please don't ask, "Henry who?") In chapter 2, Kauffman shiningly profiles that extraordinary pacifist activist, cofounder of the Catholic Worker Movement and the closest thing to St. Francis America has ever seen. He has already sketched two ex-senators he admires, Eugene McCarthy and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and revealed why McCarthy was better: Moynihan was a truth teller like McCarthy but also, finally, a political coward. Kauffman's marvelous trick of praising to the skies and then noting shortcomings and even vices increases the fascination of his remarks on such defenders of "family, community, [and] local self-rule" as Wendell Berry, Grant Wood, Carolyn Chute, Millard Fillmore ("ranks with the Quaker Herbert Hoover as the most pacific president"), as well as more obscure figures. More marvelous is that Kauffman, who freely injects himself into his prose, treats himself the same way; he vaunts his stance on something and then acknowledges his contradictions on the same matter. If figures he considers overrated don't get the same treatment, well, that helps keep things snappy. His writing persona couldn't be more appealing.Ray OlsonCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved