SOURCE: "Conflict and Consensus," in The New Republic, Vol. 195, No. 22, December 1, 1986, pp. 28-31.

In the following review, Brinkley asserts that the essays collected in Schlesinger's The Cycles of American History are eloquent reminders of the importance of history in forming an understanding of the present.

It is a tribute to Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.'s immense talents and protean accomplishments that he seems to defy conventional classification. In the course of his 40-year career, he has been a political activist (one of the founders of Americans for Democratic Action), a public official (an assistant to President Kennedy), a campaign strategist (for Adlai Stevenson and the Kennedys), a memoirist, a political essayist, and even for a time a film critic. Above all, of course, he has been a historian—perhaps the best known and most widely read American historian of his generation. But even within the historical profession, the...