Bookshelf.

Encounter Books is one of the more heartening projects in to day's literary world. Its purpose, ac cording to publisher Peter Collier (himself a distinguished author and activist, and an occasional contributor to this magazine), is to "enlarge the space for ideas in our culture." With the support of the Bradley Foundation, En counter is publishing books that are somewhat to the right of the academic mainstream, but express their views in a manner that will not alienate the impartial reader.

Judging by Encounter's first list-which includes Ward Connerly's Creating Equal, reviewed in NR's May 22 issue-there are two ways to fulfill this mandate: sheer entertainment value and sober persuasion. An excellent example of the first is The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America (326 pp., $23.95), in which culture critic Roger Kimball, author of Tenured Radicals, assembles a plethora of kooky utterances by '60s leftists.

This book, based on a series of essays in The New Criterion, where Kimball is managing editor, is (to use Kimball's characterization of one of his subjects) "useful . . . as a pathologist's scrapbook." But to confine a discussion of the book's merits to its mere utility is to do Kimball a serious injustice: What he offers, more importantly, is grand fun. An eloquent and authoritative writer, Kimball quotes one outrage after another, pausing briefly to express disapproval and to note that the pernicious ideologies have gained, since the '60s, great social acceptance. The obvious audience for this book is, of course, culture warriors of the Right; they will find much here that will delight them and get their adrenaline flowing. But lefties-if they can be persuaded to read it-might enjoy it even more. For them, the book offers not just the pleasure of reliving their victories, but also the opportunity to indulge in Schaden freude at the expense of an intelligent conservative who is frustrated by the harm he sees those victories inflicting on America. But liberals would enjoy the book at their peril: Kimball might just succeed in nurturing some seeds of doubt.

Another Encounter book illustrates the path of painstaking persuasion. The Killing of History: How Literary Critics and Social Theorists are Murdering Our Past (372 pp., $15.95) is a paperback reissue-with a new afterword-of Keith Windschuttle's devastating analysis of the erosion of history as a discipline. Windschuttle contends that the inductive method-piling up facts and working at them until they yield insight- remains the most effective road to historical truth. He makes his case by comparing the products of this approach with those written by the theorists of cultural relativism. He succeeds in proving that the relativizers have lost touch with the historical reality they seek to explain, and represent a dead end for the intellect. Wind schuttle's book is an act of what Kim ball calls cultural "recuperation" and "the patient recovery of lost virtues."

With the Kimball, Windschuttle, and Connerly books, as well as forthcoming titles such as Hegemon: China's Plan to Dominate Asia and the World by Steven W. Mosher, and Commies: A Journey Through the Old Left, the New Left, and the Leftover Left by Ronald Radosh, Encounter is off to a good start in its project of helping to reopen the American mind.