Volume 3, Number 11 · January 14, 1965
The Romance of Max Eastman
By George Lichtheim
Love and Revolution: My Journey through an Epoch
by Max Eastman
Random House, 665 pp., $8.95
American radicalism is a standing puzzle to the European. It is at once more violent and more innocent than its Old World counterpart, more flamboyant in its rhetoric of denunciation, yet at the same time so optimistic as almost to resemble a hymn of praise for life as it is lived. Moreover, it seems from the start to have been infused with a paradoxical certainty that while mankind's past history has been a mess, the future is certain to be agreeable. The best is yet to come—especially in the United States. Goethe thought the Americans were fortunate in not being weighed down with memories, and monuments, of past failures. Others have been irritated by their habit of taking it for granted that Europe's past was but an antechamber to America's present. There have even been subversive hints to the effect that this is an illusion they share with the Russians.
Review, 3383 words
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