Of Nisbets, ISBNs and Has-Beens

Continuing a previous post on Karl Popper that started as an email thread:

Okay, just one more, which I shall great-grandfather in after having name-checked Robert Nisbet in closing my lead letter in the TLS for June 26; file the age-synced obits below under "What a difference thirty-five years do not make" or perhaps an expansion of the old Benny Hill/pub joke ending with "twenty-two today!" by sixty more:

Obituary, The New York Times, 1961: 

Obituary, The New York Times, 1996: 

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*Over to you, Chuck "The Rifleman" Connors, another "conservative champion" with "Second Amendment Solutions" all your own, in this ammo-amplified case at YouTube far too many to count ...

Tying the non-gunslinger Robert Nisbet back to my earlier subject Karl Popper, I recalled that back in January 1983 in The New Republic, then in the first of its two Hendrik "Rick" Hertzberg editorships (alternating with two under Mike Kinsley, 1977-1991 combined), a young Charles Krauthammer, not long after writing speeches for Walter Mondale, reviewed Nisbet's Prejudices: A Philosophical Dictionary (practically Jonah Goldberg's Enchiridion, so he says in, inter alia, this 2017 Popper-like self-"interview") under the mock-Popperian headline "The Poverty of Ahistoricism."

Just browsing the Contents pages of those old TNR books sections forty-plus years on is enough to send this old then-collegian bookman into Proustian sugar shock, or what Joe Strummer would call "a little jump of electrical shockers", e.g., Walter Laqueur, (who had appeared in the inaugural issue of Encounter thirty years earlier as "Mark Alexander", while based in Jerusalem, in the interest of protecting intimates in sensitive regions) reviewing Noam Chomsky (headlined, harhar, "The Politics of Adolescence" - speaking of which, anybody seen my Che, I mean Murray Rothbard, T-shirt?) and the second memoir of Henry Kissinger  (reminding me of Chomsky's review of K's first one, 1500+ pp., two years earlier, in the Koch-funded, Cato-adjacent biweekly INQUIRY, "best of the right-wing rags" per Hendrik Hertzberg then). Or how about TIME culture vulture Stefan Kanfer reviewing the novel, branded odious by one critical contingent, in which

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George Steiner applied his patented "ventriloquism" (per Edward Said in the Nation, 1985) of divers figures to the special pleading in his own defense of a jungle-captured Hitler, The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H., under the headline, "The Perversity of G.S."?

I suppose, as they say, "I could write a book" on this stuff, though I shall probably have to rest content on the laurels (and, harhar, hardys) of "my" (90+% of my original 20x expansions still surviving) two li'l contest-awarded Wiki articles from 2012-2013, on the Spender-Kristol-Lasky Encounter, and Dwight Macdonald's politics.

Speaking of contact buzzes, books recently/almost ordered via Abebooks and eBay at c. $4-8 postpaid (commences shortening URLs from 1000+ characters each down to their verbal roots); tip: can't find your bibliophilic Holy Grail at a decent price - or anywhere? Try The Internet Archive and maybe, just maybe, read it for free:



Italo Calvino, Italian Folktales

Willa Cather, Collected Stories



John Keats, a yet to be determined combination of the Poems and the Selected Letters (perhaps even John Keats: A New Life by Nicholas Roe, a steal in VG cond. at $3.88 postpaid), both, I have it on 200+ years of good authority, among the finest in all the annals of English and world literature, the better to justify my constantly quoting, e.g., "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer" ("Much have I traveled in the realms of gold" ... "Silent, upon a peak in Darien." - or, in my adjacent Cheever-country high-school case almost fifty years ago, Wilton ...)

Ferdinand Mount, Jem (and Sam)

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