Posted on 02/10/2014 8:29:02 PM PST by Epistolizer
Memoirs have always been a favorite literary genre. Some, like Winston Churchill's war memoirs, track important events from a single, and commanding, vantage point, yielding an insight into the contingencies of history. Others, like St. Augustine's Confessions or John Henry Newman's Apologia pro Vita Sua, detail a person's intellectual and spiritual development over time. Some, like Katharine Graham's Personal History, are just fun.
Michael Novak's Writing from Left to Right: My Journey from Liberal to Conservative is more Forrest Gump than Churchill. It evidences none of the brutal self-inquiry displayed by Augustine or Newman, and, unlike Graham's memoir, it is just not fun to read. In shifting his ideological identity from liberal to conservative, Novak's thinking became essentially thin, and this memoir mimics that thinness.
(Excerpt) Read more at ncronline.org ...
Pay no attention to the smoking pile of ash. Dude got the zot, after posting a Reporter and a HuffPo piece within minutes of each other.
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