TO ORDER All titles may not be immediately available. . . . . . . . . . . . . RECENT REVIEWS: 7/03/97: A Journey With Elsa Cloud By Leila Hadley Nonfiction 7/02/97: News Of A Kidnapping By Gabriel García Márquez Nonfiction 7/01/97: Lolita By Vladmir Nabokov, performed by Jeremy Irons Fiction 6/30/97: Tearing The Silence: On Being German In America By Ursula Hegi Nonfiction 6/27/97: The Undertaking: Life Studies From The Dismal Trade By Thomas Lynch Nonfiction . . . . . . . . . . . . SEARCH BOOK ARCHIVES BY: title of book author publisher reviewer . . . . . . . . . . . . ALSO IN SALON: No more magic realism By Alberto Fuguet A young Latin American novelist says no more flying grannies. . . . . . . . . . . . . RECENT BOOK FEATURES

__the sense of reality: ___STUDIES IN IDEAS AND THEIR HISTORY __--- BY ISAIAH BERLIN, EDITED BY HENRY HARDY | __FARRAR, STRAUS & GIROUX | 278 PAGES | NONFICTION BY SCOTT McLEMEE there is a fragment by the ancient Greek writer Archilochus that reads: "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing." Much of his surviving work is fairly obscene -- and so, I would prefer to think, was this cryptic sentence, in its original context. But in the hands of Isaiah Berlin, the verse has become a somewhat famous way of sorting influential thinkers and artists into two large bins. Those displaying one grand passion are hedgehogs -- for instance, Proust, playing variations on time and memory -- while the foxes, like Aristotle or Shakespeare, dart with energy and grace over a much wider territory. Push it too hard, and the distinction turns to mush. Still, it is useful. And on first inspection, Berlin himself looks very foxy indeed. Most scholars are happy in their little burrows, but not Sir Isaiah. His writings have included studies of Machiavelli, the Enlightenment, 19th century Russian culture, Karl Marx and his progeny and lots else besides. Berlin's essays have made him the intellectual historian most read by people who do not spend a lot of time reading intellectual history. The scope of his work is driven not by cerebral wanderlust, but by a passionate concern to explain, and to defend, the philosophical sources of liberalism, in the fullest sense of that much-abused term. The articles and lectures assembled in his latest book return constantly to the problems of freedom, the rise of nationalism and the various challenges to liberal ideology from the right and the left. "The Sense of Reality" is, in effect, the quintessential Berlin. Why, then, is it so disappointing? Berlin's ruminations on pluralism, social engineering and government repression read like dull paraphrases of his earlier work. One of the best pieces -- a study of conflicting attitudes held by Russian intellectuals toward the social role of art, serves chiefly as a reminder of how good "Russian Thinkers" (1978) really was. "Nothing can compare with the experience of being made aware of the characteristics of the most intimate instruments with which one thinks and feels," Berlin says in the title piece. Exactly! And in his best work, he supplies a penetrating reminder of the sources of "the innermost terms, the most deeply ingrained categories with which, and not about which, one thinks." But not all of Berlin's work is so illuminating. He has off days, like the rest of us. Several more volumes of scattered materials are, no doubt, in the pipeline. That now appears a somewhat worrisome prospect. July 3, 1997 Scott McLemee, a contributing writer at Lingua Franca, writes regularly for Salon. BOOKMARK: http://www.salonmagazine.com/sneaks/sneak.html