Volume 52, Number 9 · May 26, 2005
In the Thick of Things
By Roger Shattuck
Malraux: A Life
by Olivier Todd, translated from the French by Joseph West
Knopf, 541 pp., $35.00
BOOKS DISCUSSED IN THIS ARTICLE
André Malraux: A Biography
by Curtis Cate
Fromm International, 442 pp., $29.95
Signed, Malraux
by Jean-François Lyotard,translated from the French by Robert Harvey
University of Minnesota Press, 326 pp., $59.95; $19.95 (paper)
Communism and the French Intellectuals, 1914–1960
by David Caute
Macmillan, 413 pp. (1964; out of print)
Writers on the Left: Episodes in American Literary Communism
by Daniel Aaron
Columbia University Press, 494 pp., $26.50 (paper)
Paris Journal, 1944–1965
by Janet Flanner (Genêt), edited by William Shawn
Harvest, 324 pp., $17.00 (paper)
L'État culturel: Une religion moderne (The Culture State: Essay on a Modern Religion)
by Marc Fumaroli
Paris: Fallois, 412 pp. (1999; out of print)
Mona Lisa's Escort: André Malraux and the Reinvention of French Culture
by Herman Lebovics
Cornell University Press, 246 pp., $39.95
The God That Failed
edited by R.H.S. Crossman
Harper, 273 pp. (1959; out of print)
Paperback edition published in 2001 is available from Columbia University Press.
Malraux and Corniglion-Molinier in Search of Sheba: An Arabian Adventure
by Walter G. Langlois
Revue André Malraux Review, Vol. 31, Nos. 1–2 (2002–2003),158 pp., $25.00
With remarkable equanimity, we have since 2001 assimilated into our political metabolism a new Department of Homeland Security, complete with a presidentially appointed secretary, swarming bureaucracy, and enhanced budget. The department already occupies an important position in the Washington pecking order. On the other hand, it is not hard to identify a new executive department whose proposed creation would be met not with equanimity but with furious resistance from all sides: a Department of National Culture. Most Americans believe that their culture should grow out of the free marketplace of ideas, fashions, and institutions, not out of a state command system. Our knowledge of Nazism and Soviet communism has faded but not vanished. Fortunately one of the few books that inoculate us against totalitarianism, Orwell's 1984, is still widely read in schools. We shall not soon have a secretary of culture.
Review, 4778 words
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