Few writers of the last century deserve a more drastic upward revision in their reputations and popularity than Chesterton. His magnificent prose, humanity and gift for paradox shine through his writings. His account in this volume of American culture and society exemplifies these strengths, and is the reason for my awarding it a second star. Yet this volume also includes his worst book by a long way, namely his first-hand account of Italy under Mussolini. This book doesn't approach the mendacity of some starry-eyed intellectuals who travelled to the Potemkin Villages of the Soviet Union and came back with glowing accounts of happy and fulfilled proletarians - Shaw and the Webbs, Henry Wallace (Roosevelt's Vice-President), and their equivalents (Susan Sontag, Noam Chomsky) who travelled as political pilgrims to China, Vietnam, Cuba and Nicaragua more recently. But it is still indefensible, and we admirers of Chesterton will just have to admit it. The author is massively confused; he goes on for pages and pages skirting round the question of whether he's for or against the Fascists. I'm afraid he even explicitly commends to his readers' attention the system of Fascist Syndicalism in preference to capitalism ("[A] policy ... which is worthy of a sharp and close attention which it has hardly received. It is not Socialism; it is not Distributism; but it is distinguished and divided in a most startling manner from anything to which we are accustomed as Capitalism.") All in all, this volume shows us a good and gentle man out of his depth; I'm sorry the book is in print and cannot recommend it.

Though Chesterton died in 1936, his What I Saw In America presents an analysis of American (and British) life and culture which is as pertinent today as ever. Delivered with his delicately delightful wit, only his mild tendency toward wordiness keeps this book from a 5-star rating.

Just as Priestley made the case for a code of ethics by presenting people who had none of their own, so Chesterson makes his by creating a set of principled outlaws, distancing themselves from society even as they serve its cause:

A fellow who attempts murder turns out to have purposefully failed in hopes of preventing the actual murder from taking place, a dishonest doctor turns out to have relinquished his integrity in order to save his lover's father from arrest, etc. These four stories' individual weaknesses are made less visible by their structural similarities--anything Chesterson fails to fully realize in one tale, he repeats successfully in another. And while the plots are a tad too precious for even the modern Oprah reader, they inspire nonetheless.

It's just a shame that Chesterson's heartening social commentary almost always sits beside a dismaying sense of xenophobia. His idea was to present literary diversions with progressive social and political underpinnings, and it's not well-served by his curiously pronounced racism and anti-Semitism.

Three steps forward, two steps back.

This sounded like a great book. I was familiar with most of the authors as tops in mystery. But what a disappointment! Except for one story, these stories are plain, lame trash. I was even dissatisfied with the pick from my favorite author, Edward Hoch. The publisher should contact me if they really want a book worthy of the title, but you, the reader, should steer clear of this book unless you have insomnia.

It was Block's name that drew me to this collection, but it turned out his story was not my favorite. I enjoyed the range of voices and themes throughout the tape. Were the stories best of the 20th century? That's a pretty big boast. I don't think it met it, but it was an enjoyable listen.

G.K. Chesterston displays sparkling wit and trenchant insight into human nature in this as in his other writings: the man is charming.

He is also an ignoramus of staggering proportion when it comes to basic matters concerning political economy. His criticism of the free market consists of a belief that the poor are wretchedly poor because the rich derive wealth from the poverty of the poor. Poverty exists because the rich, merely by wishing the poverty into existence, create it. Once the poor are wretchedly poor, only then will they be cowed enough to work in factories. Chesterton, with a straight face, announces that the poor who are moderately poor do not seek wages, and rich people do not seek to hire them.

He also thinks the rich could wish poverty out of being using the same magic power that they used to wish it into being, but that they selfishly refuse to use this power, because, if the poor were not wretched, the factories would find no employees, and the rich would be less rich. I am frankly baffled, in this analysis, what Chesterton thinks the factory owners do with manufactured goods once they are produced: if the rich had the power to wish wealth into being, would they not wish for wealthy customers to buy their goods? If no one buys the goods, what good are they?

Chesterton concludes his (ahem) 'analysis' by saying that the rich have unwisely 'allowed' the poor to multiply in great numbers, so that the overpopulation would increase the labor supply and drive down the height of wages: but they miscalculated in their villainy, and now they fear the numbers of the poor they way the Pharaoh feared the swelling ranks of the Hebrews. The Eugenics movement of the 1910's was a plot by the wealthy to control the numbers of the poor, who, apparently, can magically raise population rates when it suits them, but not lower them again.

He also pauses to call the rich all the usual nasty names that writers blissfully ignorant of economics call them: parasites, robbers, flint-hearted sinners, etc. Apparently wealth merely exists as a given, appearing naturally for no cause and at no cost, like manna from heaven, but the rich (somehow) with their hoodoo magic have usurped all the wealth, so the manna meant for us falls only on them. This is the economic theory of a cargo-cultist.

Chesterton's economic theory does not realize that the consumers, not the whim of the factory owner, sets the price of goods and the price of every factor of production, including the wages of labor.

His theory does not notice that the poor factory worker was mass-producing cheap goods for the poor, at prices they could afford, leading to the general rise of wealth and luxury of the nation. It is the capitalist, who invest, builds the factory, and creates the jobs. It is the capitalist who allows the poor shoeless man and the poor shoe-factory worker to make a mutually advantageous exchange.

If the rich man who built the factory were a thief, and hanged as other thieves are hanged, the victims that he robs would be the richer when he leaves off robbing them.

In reality, if the rich man does not invest, the factory is not built, and the poor man who wanted to by shoes will go unshod and the poor man working in a shoe factory will go begging.

Read this book for its lucid prose and droll paradoxes in which Chesterton finds delight: but for an understanding of how the market system works and why it works, read HUMAN ACTION by Ludwig von Mises.