In a dense diatribe thick with quotations and allusions, Lott
(American Studies/Univ. of Virginia) argues that liberals have
flocked away from the left and settled on the center, if not to the
right, of the political power line. The author has weighed in on
matters of race and culture before, and here he seems determined to
mention and/or quote and/or trash everything he's read and heard in
the dozen years since the publication of Love and Theft (1993). His
thesis-that many "liberals" have moved toward the center-is
engaging enough, though fairly patent, and his almost giddy
assaults on famous intellectuals are occasionally entertaining.
Cornel West, he writes, can be "mealy-mouthed." Lott lacerates
politicians, celebrities and Founding Fathers, as well: Bills
Clinton and Cosby take some unkind cuts, the former for his "habits
of racial condescension," the latter for his "townhouse jive,"
while Thomas Jefferson is condemned as the philosophical godfather
of Strom Thurmond. The author seems incapable of crafting a clear,
declarative sentence, and on his holiday tree of prose he strings
not lights but anvils and bowling balls. Time and again, the book
is weighed down by long quotations from texts he assails and with
lists of writers whose opinions he abhors or wishes to ridicule. He
alludes too frequently to talks he heard at academic conferences in
the 1990s, or essays he read in esoteric journals. Only in his
epilogue, a compelling account of labor disputes at the University
of Virginia, does Lott appear to be writing for anyone other than
himself. Some significant ideas caught in a hopeless tangle of
academic jargon and unpruned prose. (Kirkus Reviews)
What ever happened with that liberal intellectual "boom" of the
1980s and 1990s? In The Disappearing Liberal Intellectual , Eric
Lott- author of the prizewinning Love and Theft - shows that the
charter members of the "new left" are suffering from a condition
that he has dubbed "boomeritis." Too secure in their university
appointments, lecture tours, and book deals, the once rising stars
of the liberal elite- including Richard Rorty, Todd Gitlin, Michael
Lind, Paul Berman, Greil Marcus, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr.- have
drifted away from their radical moorings toward the political
centre. At once a chronicle of recent intellectual life and a
polemic against contemporary liberalism's accommodations of the
conservative status quo, The Disappearing Liberal Intellectual
eviscerates the complacency that has seeped into the politics of
the would-be vanguard of American intellectual thought. Lott issues
a wake-up call to the great public intellectuals of our day and
challenges them to reinvigorate political debate on campus, in
their writing, and on the airwaves.
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