American critics of the left-liberal consensus on social issues that is prevalent in English-speaking Western nations rarely receive much attention from Australia's intelligentsia -- perhaps because it is wrongly assumed that such criticisms can only be the province of grumpy old white men. Heather Mac Donald's The Burden of Bad Ideas: How Modern Intellectuals Misshape Our Society (Ivan R. Dee, Chicago, 2000) is a marvellous collection of investigative essays, most of which were published in the Manhattan Institute's City Journal between 1995 and 1999. Ms Mac Donald, a young journalist with a legal background, combines careful research with direct reportage to dissect fashionable intellectual follies about welfare, education, public health, ethnicity and crime, demonstrating that the warm inner glow amongst the privileged children of the 1960s is usually bought at the cost of even greater misfortune for the disadvantaged.
Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America (Free Press, New York, 2000) is an explosive analysis of the contemporary Black American world view, written by John McWhorter, a young black professor of linguistics at the University of California Berkeley. McWhorter never denies the terrible past that American blacks endured at the hands of their white countrymen; he just insists that in the past four decades things have changed greatly for the better, despite all the strident assertions about the supposed "racism" of white America. He argues that the greatest barrier to black well-being is an ideological fog that is prevalent even amongst prosperous blacks, and which is characterised by a "cult of victimology", separatism, and a strong anti-intellectualism. Dare one say that there are lessons for Australia in McWhorter's brave book?
One of my great regrets is that I am nowhere near as good a surfer as I would like to be, and this makes me a bit of a sucker for books about surfing. I have only just caught up with Stoked: A History of Surf Culture, (Evergreen, Los Angeles, 1998) by Drew Kampion, a former editor of Surfer magazine, and Bruce Brown, who made one of the greatest surf movies, The Endless Summer. Although the text is occasionally irritating, it was sufficiently informative on matters of anthropological interest to allow me to convince myself that I was not just indulging myself on wonderful photos and nostalgia.
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