SOURCE: Gross, John. “Confronting the ‘Isms’.” Commentary 97, no. 4 (April 1994): 63-4.

In the following review, Gross calls On Looking into the Abyss a timely work of lucid intelligence, wide-ranging scholarship, and penetrating judgment.

The historian Gertrude Himmelfarb's latest collection of essays [On Looking into the Abyss] displays all the virtues that readers have come to expect from her—lucid intelligence, wide-ranging scholarship, penetrating judgment. Good manners, too: she remains, as she has always been, a restrained and courteous controversialist. Yet one can also detect, however much it is kept under control, a new note of exasperation, even at times a hint of outright disgust.

Such sentiments are entirely in order, since almost all the essays deal with the disasters that have overtaken intellectual life in recent years. Three in particular tackle prevailing fashions head-on. The title essay, “On Looking into the Abyss,” considers deconstruction and related ailments, especially as...