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Recommended Readings, 1988, Shaun O'Connell
Recommended Readings, 1988, Shaun O'Connell
New England Journal of Public Policy
Shaun O'Connell reviews a selection of readings for would-be presidents. None of our recent presidents — going back to Dwight Eisenhower — has been a reader of "imaginative literature." While this is not, perhaps, entirely unexpected and may be indicative of the pressures on their time rather than an intrinsic aversion to literature, it should nevertheless at least lead us to ask whether their visions of who we are and our possibilities are limited by their failure to "confront some of the implications raised by serious works of the imagination, works that force us to face mysteries in the world …
In Search Of Lost Cultures: Books 1987, Shaun O'Connell
In Search Of Lost Cultures: Books 1987, Shaun O'Connell
New England Journal of Public Policy
Shaun O'Connell reviews a number of books whose focus is the "loss and tenuous preservation" of cultural values. He detects signs of a cultural crisis in which "literature and American life are increasingly detached" and disturbing indications of a loss of "national consensus," of trust, and perhaps of polity itself. Two hundred years after the signing of the Constitution, he writes, in this year of celebration, we learned in minute detail of the Iran-Contra deceits and duplicities, of government by secret White House junta having replaced the rule of law. Most dismaying of all, we did not appear to be …