An essential collection of Dwight Macdonald’s prophetic essays on politics, art, and violence in twentieth-century America.
What does extreme violence do to human values? Does the concept of collective guilt make sense in assessing responsibility for genocide? Has modern mechanized society forever destroyed the possibility of peaceful resistance through art and civil disobedience? Atrocities of the Mind presents anew Dwight Macdonald, one of America’s foremost literary journalists and political activists, grappling with the hard questions of his time—and ours.
In this collection, Macdonald writes about major events—the Holocaust, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Gandhi’s assassination, the Vietnam War, and social phenomena such as mass shootings, campus protests, and police brutality—with clear-sighted and buoyant prose. He writes incisively about the cinema of Alfred Hitchcock and Roman Polanski, praises Dorothy Day’s pacifism, and reports circulating an antiwar petition in the White House Rose Garden. And not without effect: his essay “Our Invisible Poor” is said to have spurred the Johnson administration’s War on Poverty.
Norman Mailer memorably called Macdonald “a man with whom one might seldom agree but could never disrespect because he always told the truth as he saw the truth—a man therefore of the most incorruptible integrity.” In our America, reeling from political violence, Macdonald’s truth-telling reminds us how we got here and whom we might still become.
Table of Contents:
Foreword: “Where, Our Mistake?” by Andrew Bacevich
Introduction: The Last of the Free Individuals by John Summers
The Responsibility of Peoples
On the Psychology of Killing
My Favorite General
Horrors—Ours and Theirs
The Bomb
Too Big
Why Destroy Draft Cards?
Gandhi
The Pacifist Dilemma
Homage to Twelve Judges
I Choose the West
Dorothy Day
Massacre from the Air
Politics Past
America! America!
A Good American
Massachusetts vs. Mailer
Hiroshima, Mon Amour
Mein Kampf, the Movie
Our Invisible Poor
A Day at the White House
To the Texas Society to Abolish Capital Punishment
Cosa Nostra
A General View of the Ruins
To the Collector of Internal Revenue
Index
About the Author :
Dwight Macdonald (1906–1982) was an American writer, critic, activist, editor of Partisan Review, and founder of Politics. He wrote for The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Esquire, and other publications.
John Summers is a historian, the author of Every Fury on Earth, and the editor of four books, including Dwight Macdonald’s Masscult and Midcult. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Review :
“Every American in search of the roots of solidarity and justice should read this book.”
“A necessary collection that displays Macdonald's astonishing range, his moral seriousness, and above all his resistance to cant. As a bonus, we also get fine essays by Bacevich and Summers, two intellectuals who embody the survival of Macdonald's proudly independent spirit amid the fatuous self-delusions of our historical moment.”
“'Atrocities of the Mind' is a must-read. Macdonald’s intellectual journey is a stark reminder that even for someone as brilliant as him, understanding the core problems at play and knowing how to fix them are never easy.”
