Books: One Crummy Culture

SCIENCE: THE GLORIOUS ENTERTAINMENT by Jacques Barzun. 322 pages. Harper & Row. $6.

Jacques Barzun used to have a proprietary feeling about the U.S. In God's Country and Mine, written a decade ago, he defended modern-day America against carping critics. Apparently, he did not convince himself. Now he sounds like one of the carpers.

Barzun's bugaboo is science—not just the Bomb, but all the works of science. The trouble began with Newton, whose mechanical laws of the universe reduced man to an abstraction. Later, Newton was abetted by Darwin, who said man was at the mercy of evolution, and Freud, who...

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