Word: polemicist
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Conservative polemicist Dinesh D'Souza is living every nonfiction author's fantasy: to publish at precisely the politically correct moment. Like the cavalry in an old-time western racing over the hill to save the wagon train from the murderous Indians -- oops!, misunderstood Native Americans -- Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus arrives just as public outrage is building to a peak. Liberals and conservatives alike have suddenly joined forces to ridicule the excesses of left-wing policies and posturing in academia. It is almost as if, having exorcised the legacy of Vietnam in foreign policy, Americans...
Correspondent Jeanne McDowell found Sex Researcher Shere Hite settled serenely on a satiny love seat in Hite's rococo Manhattan apartment. Instead of the antimale polemicist that McDowell had been warned about, she discovered a soft-spoken woman with a passion for classical music and antique clothes. "Walk into her house, and you feel as if you have entered another, gentler era," says McDowell. "And yet there she is, at the center of a storm about some of the most contentious issues of our time...
Rushdie the polemicist, however, tends to dart about these surfaces, fluently gliding over complexities. The dictator the Sandinistas overthrew, he asserts, was a rapist and a castrator; therefore, to call the Sandinistas totalitarian is "obscene." Somehow, the syllogism does not quite scan. Even criticisms of the leadership the visitor takes to be compliments, signs not of dissent but of democracy in action...
Despite its tendency to distribute awards along geopolitical lines, the Swedish Academy of Letters waited 85 years before bestowing the Nobel Prize for Literature on a black African. Yet when the laurel finally passed last week to Wole Soyinka, 52, a Nigerian playwright, poet, novelist, essayist and indefatigable polemicist, the justice seemed more than demographic. Discriminating theatergoers in London and New York City, as well as in Africa, have known for two decades that Soyinka is a writer worth watching and hearing. An evening in the presence of his words might bring anything: A Dance of the Forests...
...Shaws of greatest interest are the antiwarrior and the amorist. As Britain battles with the Kaiser's troops from 1914 to 1918, nationalism mounts to a frenzy. The playwright-polemicist refuses to be carried along. "War reduces us all to a common level of savagery and vulgarity," he writes to a colleague, "but at least we can shew how foolish the whole business is even from the point of view of British and German Junkerdom." In the hysteria of conflict this dual indictment earns Shaw the enmity of his countrymen. Friends cut him dead; libraries remove his books from their...