My wife claims I don’t look before I grab things from the grocery store shelves and make the purchase. I think she exaggerates. True, I did somehow get home with jalapeno ranch salad dressing instead of regular ranch. And I’ve been known to buy frozen peas and carrots when I wanted mixed vegetables. Ah, but these are minor, and they are still edible. And I never buy decaf when it’s regular coffee I want. I mean, priorities matter.
So maybe it should not be surprising that, when I saw a book titled Orthodoxy at a used bookstore I grabbed it, thinking it was G.K. Chesterson’s famous book of that name. It sat on my bookshelf for some years, came with us in the move, was reshelved, and then finally selected by me for my next read.
Only then did I notice the subtitle: The American Spectator Anniversary Anthology. This wasn’t a Christian text: it was political, commentary on life, sociology, economic systems, and all that jazz published in 1987. It’s a magazine I don’t remember and am not familiar with. The titles of the sections are:
- Media, Books, and Criticism
- Americans
- The Sexes
- Communism and Fellow Travelers
- America and the World
- Conservatives
I quickly concluded that the American Spectator must be a conservative magazine and that the title of the book meant to imply that the mag’s stories defined some kind of orthodox view of conservative beliefs. I.E. if you didn’t agree with what the mag said you weren’t orthodox in your conservative thinking.
What the heck, I thought. I might as well read it. I might find much I agree with and it will be entertaining, maybe even captivating. Alas, no such thing. I gave it a good go, reading about half of it. I read all of the first three sections and then spot-read the rest. I found the first section, book reviews, to be essentially a ridiculous rehashing of books of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, books that no one has read for fifty years and no one cares about now. Here’s how I saw the reviews (note that this is not a quote from the book):
Schmidt wrote his autobiography in 1955, claiming he never agreed with the communist Smitty’s views of 1926, but Schmidt’s contemporary Smith has proved otherwise in his analysis of Schmidt’s ten magazine articles in the 1930s.
Not even knowing who Schmidt, Smitty, and Smith were (names changed because I don’t feel like thumbing through the book to find a real example), I found myself not caring a whole lot. But I suppose the American Spectator published that article in 1980 and included it now in the anthology from 1987 to say that the article’s author, I’ll call him Smythe, was a true orthodox believer in anti-communist views.
I tried to read 10-15 of the book’s 504 pages a day, making it some days, never exceeding it, and falling short somedays as I quickly zoned out. I consider myself a conservative, but just couldn’t get through this. The world has moved on to new issues and new discussions on old issues. Maybe that’s why most magazines are for contemporary things but rarely have contents that pass the tests of time. The articles in this anthology, which I assume R. Emmett Tyrrell, the editor, selected as being both the best of and most representative of twenty years of the magazine’s history. To me, they seemed more for the purpose of showing off the authors’ obvious brilliance rather than informing readers or convincing them to orthodox thinking. These are not my kind of articles; this isn’t my kind of book.
So, despite my general agreement with the worldview underpinning much of the book, I rate it a measly 1-star. If you find it on a used bookstore shelf, leave it there and look for something by Chesterton. This is not a keeper. But I may not donate it to Goodwill. I have a friend back in Rhode Island who might eat this stuff up. I’d be willing to foot the bill to mail it to him.