Reading and Misreading Habits of the Heart*

Abstract

got a most propitious launching. Peter Steinfels reviewed the book on the front page of the York Times Book Review. The same week Ken Woodward gave the book a big play in Newsweek. We were told that that is the perfect one/two combination to send off a book that will sell well. Perhaps even more important, the Los Angeles Times reported a talk based on that I gave at Claremont College just weeks before publication. The account was accurate enough but the headline (not written by the reporter) said, New Book Attacks Christian Right. This inaccurate headline assured that the article would be very widely reprinted, not only in the U.S. but in the European Herald-Tribune, the Singapore Times, etc. You can't buy that kind of publicity. As the book reviews began to come in, they were not by any means all posi tive. An ideological pattern developed: both the right and the left hated the book. The neo-conservative right-Richard Neuhaus, Robert Nisbet, et al.-had nothing but contempt for us. Michael Novak's review was entitled Habits of the Left-Wing Heart. We were really surprised by this reaction. Neo-conservatives, especially religious ones, were always talking about family, neighborhood and intermediate associations. These figured prominently in our book. What we learned was that none of that mattered if you attacked the free market. In the end, that was where neo-conservatives had all their chips. Only later did we learn that in some right-wing circles the book was seen as pro-homosexual because of a couple of side-comments that most readers never noticed. The Nation had a review symposium with six reviewers, five of whom hated the book. Barbara Ehrenreich, in the funniest of all the reviews, asked why five