Turnabout Years.

* A veteran book reviewer was once asked whether he had read a certain book. No, he replied, "but I reviewed it." That reviewer was not John Chamberlain. Prolific as he was, he took time to read the books.

Turnabout Years (Jameson Books, 295 pp., $12.95), a collection of Chamberlain's essays written between 1950 and 1952, attests to that. His writing is not only erudite and comprehensive; it's always precise. "Here in a nutshell," writes Priscilla Buckley in her introduction, "is the intellectual story of America in the first half of this century" - a period that witnessed two world wars, a cold war, and the emergence of an ideology that attempted to end history itself. This collection captures only a few brilliant moments in the luminous life of the author, who, after The Freeman, went on to become a daily book reviewer for the New York Times and editor at Forbes and Barron's. He contributed greatly and generously as a Senior Editor at NATIONAL REVIEW.

There was perhaps no one shrewder at chronicling, for instance, the creeping Communist influence among New York intellectuals, and no one sharper in excoriating the disagreeable tendency of many in America to accept their views. These intellectuals, Chamberlain writes, "believe in the strangest things. . . . They still think that anti-Communism is not a local political issue (which means they have never listened to Polish-Americans on the subject of Yalta). . . . They still think that the way to redeem a man's character is to feed him without requiring any payment in work." Today's academics, journalists, and liberal politicians are yesterday's New York intellectuals.

Small-government proponents sympathize with Chamberlain's lament over the growing irrelevance of the Tenth Amendment - perhaps the most abused of the Bill of Rights. He reminded those who advocated "the notion that man's future can be planned collectively" about the Pilgrims, who were the first on these shores to enact such a notion. The result, as he puts it: "apathy - and actual starvation."

Turnabout Years, written forty years ago, is a refreshment in today's social dialogue, which usually concludes - in the name of fairness, of course - that we need to "soak the rich." If only Dan Rostenkowski or George Mitchell understood Chamberlain's dictum: "To defend others' millions is to protect my own hundreds!"

What comes through in his review is a sense for the American spirit, for a simple life of freedom. In a short review on gardening, a therapeutic love, Chamberlain argues against pulling weeds around tomato plants, for they provide shade during hot summer months and their roots act as "deep rivers," bringing minerals to the surface.

But he had given in to utopian dreams too, putting himself among the "lukewarm Whittaker Chamberses." "Not many of us have been spies, not many of us have ever joined the Communist Party . . . But that has not been because of our superior virtue," he says humbly. Many of his generation (including Chamberlain himself, briefly in the Twenties) succumbed to utopian thinking "in little, comfortable ways" - an implicit tribute to Chambers's denunciation of his own "high voltage" experience with Communism and powerful testimony to later becoming a living witness to his Christian faith.

Chamberlain's has not been a "high voltage" life, but his commentary on these hefty truths must have been quite shocking to his intellectual adversaries, who would crush attempts at crossing a certain ideological line. Mr. Chamberlain compiled Turnabout Years as a vindication of sorts. The book is welcome, though no vindication was necessary.

Mr. Morris is NR's Executive Editor.