Theodore Dalrymple
Myron Magnet's The Dream and the Night- mare: The Sixties Legacy to the Underclass (William Morrow & Co) seeks to explain both the existence and the conduct of the American underclass, and is one of the first books I have read which fully acknowledges that members of the underclass actually have minds and that their ideas (however mistaken or misguided) decisively influence their behaviour: in which they are just like us, in fact. It is a sign of the times that something so obvious should be so refresh- ing to read. David Stoll's Between Two Armies: In the Ixil Towns of Guatemala (Columbia University Press) is the first book I have read on Guatemala which avoids the fatuities of pro-guerrilla propa- ganda, and is all the more impressive because the author once subscribed to the pro-guerrilla viewpoint himself. A work of genuine intellectual exploration, therefore. At the other end of the scale of merit is Adam Phillips's On Flirtation (Faber, £14.99), full of the type of windy obscuri- ties which strike so many British intellectu- als as profound.
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