Books in Brief

The Southern Front: History and Politics in the Cultural War, by Eugene D. Genovese (Missouri, 320 pp., $29.95 WHEN I read the writings of Eugene Genovese, I have to remind myself that critical judgment is not to be shelved simply because of the great debt I and other Southerners, who have been kicked around by the morally superior Yankees, owe him. One doesn’t need a good or long memory to recall when those of us who read and admired Richard Weaver and M. E. Bradford could fit into the proverbial phone booth. We were a terribly inbred group, but not by choice. Then along came a New Yorker of Italian ancestry; a Marxist at that, who writes about the subjects and ideas we Southerners consider important, and not only gets away with it, but is widely read and taken very seriously, even at Harvard and Yale. This collection of essays published by Beverly Jarrett’s outstanding University of Missouri Press is not only educational: it is exciting; it is fun. It can make you laugh; it can make you angry; it always makes you think. Genovese hits the ball to all fields—religion, politics, history, ethics, education, law, slavery, poetry, Marxism, and the South. He’s our Babe Ruth—and our Hank Aaron.

—Ben C. Toledano

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Ben C. Toledano

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Joel Brind

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The Southern Front: History and Politics in the Cultural War, by Eugene D. Genovese (Missouri, 320 pp., $29.95 WHEN I read the writings of Eugene Genovese, I have to remind myself that critical judgment is not to be shelved simply because of the great debt I and other Southerners, who have been kicked around by the morally superior Yankees, owe him. One doesn’t need a good or long memory to recall when those of us who read and admired Richard Weaver and M. E. Bradford could fit into the proverbial phone booth. We were a terribly inbred group, but not by choice. Then along came a New Yorker of Italian ancestry; a Marxist at that, who writes about the subjects and ideas we Southerners consider important, and not only gets away with it, but is widely read and taken very seriously, even at Harvard and Yale. This collection of essays published by Beverly Jarrett’s outstanding University of Missouri Press is not only educational: it is exciting; it is fun. It can make you laugh; it can make you angry; it always makes you think. Genovese hits the ball to all fields—religion, politics, history, ethics, education, law, slavery, poetry, Marxism, and the South. He’s our Babe Ruth—and our Hank Aaron.

—Ben C. Toledano