A TEXAN'S TAKE ON TAKI'S TAC:

Room for Improvement: Buchanan and Taki's The American Conservative. (Derek Copold, 10/06/02, The Texas Mercury)

Overall, I found TAC to be a good magazine, but not a great one. In its favor, TAC is tightly edited and tastefully formatted. I was able to read through it in about two hours, a good sign. What kept this issue from being great was the fact that most of the articles, though well written, failed to offer much in the way of new information. They were little more than extended opinion columns.  That's all right for a newspaper's editorial page, but in a magazine, readers want to see more than generalities; they want specifics: information about affairs they wouldn't normally find in either the paper or on the Internet. Only a few of the articles in TAC's inaugural edition were able to do this.

The best piece in this issue, though, was written by the relatively unknown Howard Sutherland, who analyzed an on-going attempt to sue South African companies for apartheid reparations. This article deserves special mention because the information it brings to light is invaluable. A lawyer himself, Sutherland dissects "Holocaust reparations" attorney Edward Fagan's attempt to turn the obscure Alien Tort Claims Act of 1789 to his financial advantage.  Sutherland describes how this law, originally intended to help the victims of piracy on the high seas reclaim their goods from stateless buccaneers, is now under assault by Fagan. He then draws out for the reader the possible implications that might follow should Fagan succeed, most notably an unending series of lawsuits to win slavery reparations for black Americans. Stuffed with facts, logic and expert opinion, this is the kind of article a magazine like The American Conservative should publish.

Mr. Copold, who puts out a consistently interesting magazine of his own, offers a thorough and fair assessment, something that's been rare in mainstream media. It sounds like TAC is at least promising, though no sure thing. Posted by Orrin Judd at October 8, 2002 1:52 PM