The last ten or fifteen years have been marked by two prominent notions among intellectuals. Many writers have felt that the essence of the period has been the eruption of hot issues through the fissures and seams of American political compromises. Current political language often sounds like a new geometry developed to measure gaps and distances between groups of people. Without a climate of compromise, politically conscious writers are more often than not compelled to take a position and hold ground as if under attack. Thus, Renata Adler entitled her book of reportage Toward a Radical Middle, which says very little about her work in the sixties but quite a bit about the need to locate on the generational battlefield. (p. 580)

The problem of assessing one's own past writings is often as difficult as the actual writing about one's experience. Renata Adler's fourteen pieces of reporting and criticism...