On Looking Into the Abyss: Untimely Thoughts on Culture and Society

Noted historian Himmelfarb ( Poverty and Compassion ) deems current intellectual fashions arrogant and spiritually bankrupt in these seven invigorating essays expanded from pieces originally published in Commentary , American Scholar , the New York Times Book Review and elsewhere. She lambastes deconstructionists like Jacques Derrida and Geoffrey Hartman, relativist philosopher Richard Rorty, postmodernists and multiculturalists who ``pluralize and particularize history to the point where people have no history in common.'' Many of these trendy academic schools, argues Himmelfarb, trivialize history, as exemplified by their inability to comprehend the full import of the Holocaust. She also blasts apologists for Martin Heidegger, an ``outspoken and unrepentant Nazi.'' Elsewhere she ponders the internal contradictions confronting Western liberal democracies and the ``lethal combination of nationalism and religion'' sweeping the globe from the Middle East to Yugoslavia. (Feb.)