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joyxrm1's review against another edition
3.0
I feel odd giving Robert Penn Warren a 3 star review, but despite the beautiful rich language.....his essay was a stream of consciousness musing with an occasional gem. It was interesting to read this 50 years later and think of him writing it in the middle of the Civil Rights movement and the Cold War.
zachkuhn's review
5.0
I'm guessing Warren wrote this in 1961 in honor of the 100 years that had crept away between the start of the Civil War and the heart of Jim Crow.
It speaks to the America of now, and of then, and of all the Americas between. A compendium of brilliance and perspective.
"The Treasury of Virtue, which is the psychological left to the North by the Civil War, may not be as comic or vicious as the Great Alibi, but is equally unlovely. It may even be, in the end, equally corrosive of national, and personal, integrity. If the Southerner, with his Great Alibi, feels trapped by history, the Northerner, with his Treasury of Virtue, feels redeemed by history, automatically redeemed. He has in his pocket, not a Papal indulgence peddled by some wandering pardoner of the Middle Ages, but an indulgence, a plenary indulgence, for all sins past, present, and future, freely given by the hand of history."
God damn god damn I say god damn!
It speaks to the America of now, and of then, and of all the Americas between. A compendium of brilliance and perspective.
"The Treasury of Virtue, which is the psychological left to the North by the Civil War, may not be as comic or vicious as the Great Alibi, but is equally unlovely. It may even be, in the end, equally corrosive of national, and personal, integrity. If the Southerner, with his Great Alibi, feels trapped by history, the Northerner, with his Treasury of Virtue, feels redeemed by history, automatically redeemed. He has in his pocket, not a Papal indulgence peddled by some wandering pardoner of the Middle Ages, but an indulgence, a plenary indulgence, for all sins past, present, and future, freely given by the hand of history."
God damn god damn I say god damn!
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