Bøker av Lee Congdon

Warrior-Writers of World War II delivers a thorough study of key American writers who experienced combat in World War II in the European or Pacific Theater, survived, and returned home to become famous writers.

George Kennan for Our Time examines the work and thought of the most distinguished American diplomat of the twentieth century and extracts lessons for today. In his writings and lectures, Kennan outlined the proper conduct of foreign policy and issued warnings to an American society on the edge of the abyss. Lee Congdon identifies the principles Kennan applied to US relations with Russia and Eastern Europe, and to the Far and Near East. He takes particular note of Kennan's role in formulating postwar policy in Japan, measured response to North Korea's invasion of South Korea, and opposition to the war in Vietnam. Congdon also considers Kennan's strong criticisms of his own country, its egalitarianism, unrestricted immigration, and multiple addictions. He cites Kennan's call for a greater closeness to nature, a revival of religious faith, and a return to the representative government established by the Founding Fathers. George Kennan for Our Time describes the often-disastrous results of rejecting Kennan's counsel, and the dangers, international and national, posed by an ongoing failure to draw upon his wisdom. In view of America's foreign policy disasters in Afghanistan, Iraq, and around the world, Kennan's realist approach provides important lessons for our current age.

Baseball fans, and people who find them puzzling, are amazed by fans' memories. That is, they are amazed by the amount of memory storage space occupied by stuff like the name of the man Bob Feller almost picked off second base in the 1948 World Series (The Boston Braves' Phil Masi). Now comes Lee Congdon to explain why baseball is for America what the madeleine was for Proust, and why that is such a wholesome thing. - George Will, columnist and author of Men at Work: The Craft of Baseball, and Bunts.Lee Congdon has written a warmly personal and charming account of his love for baseball and his special admiration for the 1950s, which he portrays as a golden era of that sport and of American society and culture. It will revive fond memories for his contemporaries and help younger generations understand an older one. - Donald Kagan, Sterling Professor of Classics and History, Yale University.Lee Congdon, one of our finest intellectual historians, presents a brilliantly double-layered account of what was once America's undisputed National Pastime, baseball. The account is double-layered in the sense that great allegory is double-layered: there are the wonderful events, exciting in themselves, and the moral lessons they embody, never thinning to mere symbolic abstraction. The Fifties are presented as baseball's Golden Age, but we realize that, as the author puts it, "Remembering the fifties . . . is an effort to take stock of what America once was and what it has now become." Such sad developments as the loss of loyalty to place, leading players to change teams repeatedly, and the widespread use of steroids, clearly demonstrate that "In baseball - as in life - the burden of proof should always rest on those who advocate change, not on those who stand for continuity." Congdon is masterly in his exposure of the false utopianism that leads our current intellectual class to undertake revision of history, and even to hold memory itself in suspicion. His writing perfectly combines eloquence with crisp clarity: he could have been a great sports writer. The pages turn themselves, and the agonies and ecstasies of baseball are fully relived for their own sake, even as they serve as a parable of glory and decline. - Jonathan Chaves, The George Washington University

Scarred by Europe's wars, Hungary produces a number of the 20th century's leading intellectuals, many of whom lived outside their native land in exile. This text argues that the great debate over communism was at the crux of the lives and thought of the Hungarian intellectuals in exile.

Based on recently found manuscripts and correspondence, The Young Lukacs is the first comprehensive and fully researched portrait of Georg Lukacs to appear in any language. Lee Congdon finds in the young Lukacs's estrangement from his family and from Hungarian society roots for his continuing concern with the philosophic problem of alienation.

This study of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) and his writings focuses on his reflections on the religiopolitical trajectories of Russia and the West, understood as distinct civilizations. What perhaps most sets Russia apart from the West is the Orthodox Christian faith. The mature Solzhenitsyn returned to the Orthodox faith of his childhood...

This book details the lives and careers of four sports-writing greats-Grantland Rice, Red Smith, Shirley Povich, and W. C. Heinz-and the legendary athletes and events they covered for decades. These men all wrote during what is often considered sport's Golden Age, lifting sports reporting to heights that it is unlikely to reach again.