Barbarian Sentiments; How the American Century Ends
New York: Hill and Wang [A Division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux], 1989. First edition. Stated. Presumed first printing. Hardcover. [10], 198 pages. Index. The author argues that both the United States and the Soviet Union have suffered repeated and disabling collisions with radical national movements in Asia, the Middle East, and Central America. William Pfaff (December 29, 1928 – April 30, 2015) was an author, op-ed columnist for the International Herald Tribune and frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books. Pfaff served in infantry and Special Forces units of the U. S. Army during and after the Korean War. His first book, The New Politics: America and the End of the Postwar World (with Edmund Stillman) was published in 1961. Seven others followed. In 1978, he resigned from the Hudson Institute Europe to continue his career as a freelance journalist and writer. His most prestigious contract was with William Shawn's The New Yorker. Between 1971 and 1992, he published more than 70 "Reflections" ("a political-literary form of your own invention," his editor, Shawn, wrote to him), on international politics and society. Pfaff's other long-standing contract was for a twice-weekly opinion column for the International Herald Tribune; it continued in one form or another until his death. In 1989, Pfaff brought out a modified collection of several of his New Yorker pieces, "The Barbarian Sentiments." Although it was mostly written and edited in 1988, the political events of 1989 culminating in the fall of the Berlin Wall seemed to vindicate Pfaff's views on foreign policy. He was honored by being a finalist for the 1989 National Book Award, and in the years that followed, he became a much sought-after lecturer throughout the world. Derived from a Publishers Weekly article: Pfaff sees America's failure to grasp the independent nature of resurgent nationalisms in the Third World as the Achilles' heel of U.S. foreign policy. This commentator for the New Yorker (where many of these seven compelling essays first appeared) takes both liberals and conservatives to task for their sentimental, self-aggrandizing assumptions that other countries should be more like us. A tough-minded, shrewd critic who takes the long view, Pfaff suggests that Japan's meteoric transformation into industrial superpower may be an exception rather than a norm of development, and argues that the U.S.S.R. has lost a cultural struggle in Central Europe, where continued Soviet domination has become intolerable. He ponders Gorbachev's seemingly impossible balancing-act as the Soviet leader attempts to introduce greater freedoms while promoting a one-party system that will strengthen his own power. Condition: Very good / Very good.
Keywords: Capitalism, Nazism, NATO, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Vietnam War, Foreign Policy, Nationalism, Gorbachev, Communism
ISBN: 9780809066650
[Book #60453]
Price: $45.00