“Dying just when he should have come into his own, Randolph Bourne left behind him a set of brilliant essays on the political life of yesterday. These have been gathered and edited by James Oppenheim with a foreword perhaps a thought too laudatory. Yet much can be said for Mr Bourne’s keen insight and flashing style. His sentences are diamond cut, his reasoning clear even to the most undiscerning.”
+ Boston Transcript p6 Ap 28 ’20 240w
Reviewed by E. C. Parsons
+ Dial 68:367 Mr ’20 1500w
“They are courageous papers in that they represent an unwincing defence of an attitude which can never have been at all popular. They are turned from protest into positive statement by a long and unfinished essay on the state, in which Mr Bourne was clearly searching to vindicate the ultimate rights of personality against the demands of authority outside. The whole essay is a superb cry of anger against a tyranny which he felt to be grinding. Yet I venture to think that the essay is in fact largely devoid of realistic basis. It has a specialized motivation which makes it valuable as the record of a personal experience, but impracticable as a contribution to political science.” H. J. Laski
+ − Freeman 1:237 My 19 ’20 1150w
“It is the book of a too sensitive spirit, dying brokenhearted in a world that seemed hopelessly insane and misdirected. Whatever we may think of the substance of these essays there can be no question of the delicate beauty of their expression or the evidence they give of the patrician dignity and courage which marked the author’s personality.”
+ Ind 102:234 My 8 ’20 100w
“No educated, honest, able-bodied man can read the war essays of Randolph Bourne without some degree of admiration for their dead author and some sort of shame for himself. What we say now without being either brave or original he said then, not, perhaps, with the maturity of a Bertrand Russell or a Romain Rolland, but at least with fine courage and imagination. It may turn out that the cleanest picture of ourselves when we were not ourselves is here in these two hundred and thirty pages.”
+ Nation 110:522 Ap 17 ’20 380w