Customer Reviews

The Repeal of Reticence: A History of America's Cultural and Legal Struggles over Free Speech, Obscenity, Sexual Liberation, and Modern Art

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Using a quiet, restrained writing style that is a pure pleasure to read, Gurstein chronicles the one-sided battle between the party of exposure and the party of reticence. She is on the side of reticence and writes with the pained nostalgia of a Southerner describing aspects of the War Between the States. Guerstein knows that reticence is a lost cause; she asks only whether it should be.

Gurstein makes a quiet case for the reintroduction of taste, judgement, and sensibility into our public lives. This is a common theme these days. What is uncommon is that she derives her "argument" (always presented with the greatest of civility) from the distortion of privacy that somehow led from Brandeis's great legal work on privacy to the transformation of social man to private men and women and eventually to the public dissemination of all sorts of private matters. This is innovative and intriguing.

Reticence should emerge from the coordinated behavior of civilized persons; it should not be coerced by legislation and litigation. It is thus especially appropriate that Gurstein never hectors or lectures. Instead, she paints such a delightful alternative portrait of life, far from morning talk radio, nightly real tv, and ever-present commercial messages in nearly all media, that she inspires the reader to aspire toward at least some aspects of reticence.

I felt that Gurstein did not define reticence early enough and failed to take advantage of the opportunities to add more detail as the book progressed. I assume that the party of reticence acquired useful knowledge over time, such as after its (happily) failed efforts to prosecute the publisher of Joyce's Ulysses. But these reservations are minor.

My most serious concern is whether the domestic party of reticence has foreign (and sometimes not-so-foreign) counterparts in governments that have successfully enforced taste through stern rule of law. I would have appreciated a treatment of these cultural (or anti-cultural) forces. Althoug! h very difficult, such an effort would have greatly sharpened my understanding of the tenets of the party of reticence and its role in our society. Gurstein surely knows that the mere existence of such potential counterparts to her domestic party of reticence may chill further inquiry; after all, she records numerous instances in which the party of exposure has dangled straw men for talismanic protection from true debate. It would be very useful if Gurstein, accounting for the human rights of those oppressed by governmental regimes, could make a better case for the human rights of those increasingly oppressed by the party of exposure, whose methodology of oppression is vastly different. The incremental personal losses to the party of exposure do not lend themselves to the same degree of drama, but possibly, over a sufficiently long period of time, they can present, cumulatively, a meaningful loss of freedom.

Henry James wrote that the words, "summer afternoon" were the most pleasant in the English language. Take a summer afternoon (or two) to read this euphonious essay for a refreshing breather from the cacophony of Howard Stern, Don Imus, and their local knock-offs; follow-up news stories on Viagra; Judge Judy; infomercials; network news; and the culture of money, sex, power, and fame hustled by the print and electronic media.