SOURCE: Teachout, Terry. “The Abyss Stares Back.” New Criterion 12, no. 10 (June 1994): 70-3.

In the following review, Teachout offers high praise for On Looking into the Abyss, calling it a “lucid and compelling contribution to the ongoing debate over the future of American culture.”

Those who casually dismiss Holocaust deniers as psychotic are missing the point. Outright denial is merely the most straightforward of a variety of unsavory responses to the Holocaust that have emerged in recent years. The Holocaust, after all, is the most awkward fact in twentieth-century history. All roads lead to it, and many go no farther. Economic determinism, the aestheticization of history, the denial by liberals of the existence of evil, even the very idea of progress itself: such shibboleths of modern thought look uniformly and unutterably foolish when weighed in the balance with the burnt corpses of six million Jews. For anyone who nonetheless...