Thirty years since it was first published, Macdonald's masterful book on the Ford Foundation remains the only book-length account of this institution that has been published. Despite the calls for a book carrying on the story from 1956 on the part of Richard Magat and McGeorge Bundy, that book has yet to be written. In his stimulating introduction to this new edition, Francis Sutton suggests why this is so. The Foundation, he observes, has never again aroused as much public interest as it did in the years Macdonald's describes. The announcement that a new program would be launched with the riches that 90 percent of the Ford Motor Company's stock would bring captured the attention of the media all across the country. Its sheer size was astounding; in 1954 the Ford Foundation spent four times as much as the Rockefeller Foundation and ten times as much as the Carnegie Corporation. Its expenditures were very large in relation to the budgets of the institutions that looked to it for help. Consequently, the American public waited expectantly to see what this huge foundation would do. But the Ford Foundation was not only big; it was controversial in those years, and inspired activism in the media, Congressional investigations, and political wrath. Macdonald nicely captures the American ambivalence toward large bureacratic organizations, which the Ford Foundation epitomizes, with its own language and, one might argue, its own values. Sutton points out that Macdonald's writing also sets a model for foundation history and indeed philanthropic history, with a poised, ironic detachment that has remained rare. His introduction points out the main themes of Macdonald's book and examines the extent to which they continue to illumine the foundation in the years since this book was first published. It looks at how well the Foundation has addressed the objectives it set for itself, and nicely captures the giant changes that this giant foundation has experienced through the 1960s and 1970s, to the present day.

Thirty years since it was first published, Macdonald's masterful book on the Ford Foundation remains the only book-length account of this institution that has been published. Despite the calls for a book carrying on the story from 1956 on the part of Richard Magat and McGeorge Bundy, that book has yet to be written. In his stimulating introduction to this new edition, Francis Sutton suggests why this is so. The Foundation, he observes, has never again aroused as much public interest as it did in the years Macdonald's describes. The announcement that a new program would be launched with the riches that 90 percent of the Ford Motor Company's stock would bring captured the attention of the media all across the country. Its sheer size was astounding; in 1954 the Ford Foundation spent four times as much as the Rockefeller Foundation and ten times as much as the Carnegie Corporation. Its expenditures were very large in relation to the budgets of the institutions that looked to it for help. Consequently, the American public waited expectantly to see what this huge foundation would do. But the Ford Foundation was not only big; it was controversial in those years, and inspired activism in the media, Congressional investigations, and political wrath. Macdonald nicely captures the American ambivalence toward large bureacratic organizations, which the Ford Foundation epitomizes, with its own language and, one might argue, its own values. Sutton points out that Macdonald's writing also sets a model for foundation history and indeed philanthropic history, with a poised, ironic detachment that has remained rare. His introduction points out the main themes of Macdonald's book and examines the extent to which they continue to illumine the foundation in the years since this book was first published. It looks at how well the Foundation has addressed the objectives it set for itself, and nicely captures the giant changes that this giant foundation has experienced through the 1960s and 1970s, to the present day.

A New York Review Books Original. Political radical, trenchant essayist, and impresario of the New York Intellectuals, Dwight MacDonald was one of the towering figures of twentieth century American letters. In Masscult & Midcult: Essays Against the American Grain, first published in 1962, MacDonald turned his formidable critical attention to what he saw as a new, and potentially catastrophic, development in the history of Western civilization: the influence-by turns distorting, destructive, and inadvertently ridiculous-of mass culture on high culture. In essays that range in subject matter from Ernest Hemingway, James Agee, and Tom Wolfe to Webster's Dictionary and the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, MacDonald is shrewd, passionate, and bracingly alive to the complexities of his subject, which he defines as being "not the dead sea of masscult but rather the life of the tide line where higher and lower organisms compete for survival." Prescient, profound, at once scathing and hilarious in their indictment of the middlebrow sensibility, the pieces in this volume constitute an indispensable work of criticism born out of and informed by the conviction that "a people that loses contact with its past becomes culturally psychotic."

Additional Editors Include William Phillips, And Philip Rahv. Includes The Articles French Writers Under Hitler, By Frank Jones; Letters To The Editor, By T. S. Eliot; London Letter, By George Eliot And Many Others.

Endorsements: "The reissue of Camus' seminal essay, 'Neither Victims nor Executioners, ' could hardly be more timely. In Iraq and Afghanistan, the hideous march to oblivion goes on apace. America is ironically reversing the ethic proposed by Camus' title. American adventuring, playing the part of omnipotent executioner, is creating multitudes of victims. No search is undertaken for a 'third way.' Indeed, were the Camus thesis proposed, it would evoke only wide-eyed innocent arrogance. Kennedy and Klotz-Chamberlin have dedicated a lifetime to the 'third way' commended by Camus. Our gratitude to our mentors for a prescient, timely introduction." --Fr. Daniel Berrigan, SJ "Pacifists are not looking for a Utopian outlook nor unrealistic expectations. Many said, 'South Africa will not change.' But it did. Others looked at Northern Ireland and, it took years, but it also changed. The Soviet Union changed. The Middle East will change but not through violence or murder. We still think of ourselves within borders, protecting ourselves from others, Europe took its borders away and they are better. South, Central, and North America should take away their borders, as well as people in the Middle East. . . . We should build a culture of nonviolence through an understanding of human rights without regard to race, religion, and nationality." --Mubarak Awad, founder of Nonviolence International "If we spontaneously approve of nuclear terrorism, if we become apologists for the uninhibited use of naked power, we are thinking like Communists, we are behaving like Nazis, and we are well on the way to becoming either one or the other. In that event we had better face the fact that we are destroying our own Christian heritage." --Thomas Merton Author Biography: Albert Camus (November 7, 1913 - January 4, 1960) was a French author and philosopher and one of the principal luminaries (with Jean-Paul Sartre) of existentialism. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957.