This morning we conclude our preview of the new (Summer) issue of the Claremont Review of Books. In our preview of the issue I passed over outstanding reviews and essays by Charles Kesler (on campus protest then and now), William Voegeli (on “diversity”), James Ceaser (on the current populist wave), Harvey Mansfield (on “polarization”), Algis Valiunas (on Frank Lloyd Wright), Brian Anderson (on Jane Jacobs) and others. Subscribe at the heavily subsidized price of $19.95 by clicking on Subscription Services at the link, get immediate online access thrown in for free and read the whole thing.
The novelist Mark Helprin is a regular columnist for the CRB. In his column for this issue Helprin writes “In praise of Thomas Sowell.” Speaking of Sowell, Helprin observes that “the ability to see things as they really are engenders hostility from countless factions in thrall to countless illusions.”
As Sam and Dave almost put it in the Hayes/Porter number, I’m a Sowell man. I have counted myself a Sowell man ever since I read Sowell’s 1975 Commentary review of the book Money by the then widely respected liberal economist John Kenneth Galbraith. It is illustrative of some of the qualities that Helprin celebrates and accordingly makes a good companion to Helprin’s tribute to the one and only Thomas Sowell.
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