SOURCE: A review of The Culture We Deserve, in Virginia Quarterly Review, Vol. 66, No. 2, Spring, 1990, p. 64.

In the following review of The Culture We Deserve, the critic characterizes Barzun's essays “breezy” but “refreshing.”

Biting the hand that feeds one has become a favorite sport of several American scholars, who collect handsome royalty checks from the very mass marketing industry that they decry in their best sellers. Jacques Barzun, who engaged in the culture battles long before it became fashionable and lucrative, has joined the fray with his own collection of stimulating but ultimately frustrating essays. These pieces from the last decade offer his complaints regarding everything from scholarship (overspecialization and theorizing) to relativism (its abuse) to the humanities (poorly served by academia) to high art (its overabundance) to linguistics and rhetoric (their silly scientism). The parts are greater than the whole, as a compelling, overarching perspective on our...