That looks a little dense, maybe later. The Tosches book is good, but he's toned down his usually crackling prose for this one. It's a subject dear to his heart and he's done some serious research. I have put that one aside also. I managed to breeze through this quick easy read though. I had no idea Grant Wood was such a radical! And the chapter on Dorothy Day was nice. An amazon review:
>>Bill Kauffman's "Look Homeward, America" is as refreshingly quirky as the heroes of place, community, and freedom one meets in its pages. It is a brilliant book, but also one that frequently causes the reader to wince--at times because Kauffman's keen observations are expressed so succinctly as to overwhelm with their heart-rending truth and honesty, at other times because his free flowing invective is so spot on it seems almost brutally cruel.
Part rhapsodic panegyric, part unmitigated venting of spleen, "Look Homeward, America" explores everything Kauffman loves and loathes about America: the modern America of chain restaurants, shopping malls, big box stores, fake boobs, and smart bombs and the not-yet-dead alternative America rooted in the love of place and communitarian values. Kauffman shows us that this alternative America has a worthy history exemplified by an unlikely cast of heroes including U.S. Senators Eugene McCarthy and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, founders of the Catholic Worker Movement Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin, mid-western visual artists John Steuart Curry and Grant Wood, Maine novelist and founder of a "love militia" Carolyn Chute, and the great Kentucky farmer and agrarian author and essayist Wendell Berry, just to name a few.
His invective is reserved mainly for politicians: JFK, LBJ, Nixon, Kissinger, Bush, Cheney, the Clintons. And it can be quite nasty: he calls Kennedy a "priapic skirt-chasing male bimbo" and mocks his "fabled forty-five second love marathons." He takes a nice swipe at the National Organization of Women, "who stroked Senator Clinton's randy husband as though they were silky hookers." And another swipe at "diversity," "...back in those prelapsarian days before mandatory 'diversity' drove off the entire nineteenth century and left our daughters with the belief that the Revolutionary and Civil Wars were fought primarily by runaway slaves and girls dress as boys."
But "Look Homeward" is not an endless tirade; there's plenty of love it in as well. One of the most interesting chapters in the book is about pariah novelist Carolyn Chute, a woman now universally ignored and disdained by the mainstream media and chattering literary class. Nevertheless, Carolyn Chute is a woman whose ideas deserve a hearing and thankfully Bill Kauffman had the gumption to interview her and share her insights with the public rather than turn away in horror from someone so un-p.c. as to advocate armed militias.
Although published by ISI, "Look Homeward" is not unlikely to make conservative Republican readers feel ill at ease. (For example, Kauffman at one point viciously flays Lamar Alexander while extolling the goodness of Mother Jones. And he's no more a fan of Reagan than Clinton or LBJ.) However, in a time of mindless red state/blue state myopia Kauffman's fearlessness in searching out the virtuous traits of politicos from both the left and the right of the political spectrum--what Kauffman calls "our hopelessly inadequate and painfully constrictive political corral"--is both stimulating and challenging.
"Look Homeward, America" is a fine book. At once discursive, discerning, gentle, bitter, nostalgic, and hopeful, it aptly describes the moral and spiritual emptiness of a far-flung empire of the deracinated, and the joys to be found instead in family and community life firmly rooted in place and history. It is also a nice antidote to Rod Dreher's Crunchy Cons, which is a fine book and expresses some of the same sentiments but is a bit too prissy and pulls too many punches. Bill Kauffman doesn't pull any punches.
amazon.com |
