Christmas Book Recommendations by Jacques Barzun (Harper’s, Dec. 1976)

Delicacy linked with power is rare in fiction at any time and today more than ever. That is why I suggest reading the novels — six of them — written a quarter-century ago by the late Anne Goodwin Winslow, a New Englander transplanted to the South and widely travelled besides. Begin with It Was Like This (1949) or A Quiet Neighborhood (1947).

Then modulate to the short study, The Harried Leisure Class (1970) by the Swedish economist and member of parliament Staffan B. Linder. He explains in his own excellent English why in proportion to our help from gadgets and machines those of us from whose calm contemplation the world might conceivably benefit are driven like squirrels in a wheelcage.

For insight into another department of our unsatisfactory existense, turn to Theodore Caplow’s definitive statement of the reasons why programs of social betterment fail of their object and waste our money. Toward Social Hope (1975) is again a small book. It combines trenchant description with brilliant historical judgments and establishes the indispensable criteria for assessing and managing social undertakings, from the war on poverty to the avoidance of war itself. Caplow, as his other works demonstrate, is unique among sociologists in being a highly cultivated mind and a superb writer — witness the chapter in Two Against One (1968)where he applies to Hamlet his understanding of human alliances.

I call him unique, because I want to claim Robert Nisbet as an historian, despite his willingness to consort with sociologists and to be known as one of them. In any event, his most recent essay, Sociology as an Art Form (1976),shows his critical and historical powers in brief compass; the reader will probably be too busy thinking to bother about classifying the author.

After those short and suggestive works, all of them philosophical in the true sense, I would urge the reading of Jonathan Goodman on The Killing of Julia Wallace (1976). He reconstructs with consummate skill the best unsolved murder of our century — best, because it is as full of clues and limiting factors as any contrived tale, because the large cast of characters (including the police and the law men) is remarkable, and because the case has aroused conflicting passions in the notable literature published about it during the last forty years. Mr. Goodman, I may say with confidence, has produced the classic account: thorough but never tedious, scholarly yet original, vivid though sober in tone — altogether satisfying as history and entertainment.

(Note: The books by Anne Goodwin Winslow are available at IWP Books).