Daniels, Anthony 1949-

(Theodore Dalrymple)

PERSONAL: Born October 11, 1949, in London, England. Hobbies and other interests: Travel.

ADDRESSES: Home—England. Agent—c/o Author Mail, Ivan R. Dee, 1332 N. Halsted St., Chicago, IL 60622-2694. E-mail—ADan530211@aol.com.

CAREER: Psychiatrist, medical journalist, author.

WRITINGS:

NONFICTION; AS ANTHONY DANIELS

Coups and Cocaine: Two Journeys in South America, Overlook Press (Woodstock, NY), 1986.

Fool or Physician: The Memoirs of a Sceptical Doctor, J. Murray (London, England), 1987.

Zanzibar to Timbuktu, J. Murray (London, England), 1988.

Sweet Waist of America: Journeys Around Guatemala, Hutchinson (London, England), 1990.

Utopias Elsewhere: Journeys in a Vanishing World, Crown (New York, NY), 1991, published in England as The Wilder Shores of Marx: Journeys in a Vanishing World, Hutchinson (London, England), 1991.

Monrovia Mon Amour: A Visit to Liberia, J. Murray (London, England), 1992.

NONFICTION; AS THEODORE DALRYMPLE

An Intelligent Person's Guide to Medicine, Duckworth (London, England), 2001.

Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass, Ivan R. Dee (Chicago, IL), 2002.

Our Culture, What's Left of It: The Mandarins and the Masses, Ivan R. Dee (Chicago, IL), 2005.

Contributor of a weekly column to Spectator, and essays to City Journal.

SIDELIGHTS: Though he makes his living as a psychiatrist, British author Anthony Daniels is best known for his travel writings. Most of Daniels's adventures take place not in the relatively safe and familiar capitals of the West, but in Third World locales in Latin America and Africa, and even—as he recorded in Utopias Elsewhere: Journeys in a Vanishing World, his recollections of a 1989 trip—the rapidly diminishing world of Marxist police states. In the introduction to Utopias Elsewhere, he wrote: "I have long been fascinated by the passing of ways of life. In 1975, shortly after I qualified as a doctor, I went for a few months to work in Rhodesia, as [the present nation of Zimbabwe] was then still called. I wanted to witness the last gasp of the colonial world before it passed into an oblivion from which it would be rescued only by vilification."

Daniels's first book, Coups and Cocaine: Two Journeys in South America, took him to Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, Brazil, Chile, and Paraguay, where he saw another threatened way of life. In this case, however, politics were not the defining factor; drugs were. Among the more hair-raising of his stories, as noted by reviewers both in the Christian Science Monitor and the Times Literary Supplement, was a visit to four Americans convicted of drug-smuggling and incarcerated in a Bolivian jail. John Ure of the Times Literary Supplement faulted Daniels for "trying the stuff [cocaine], and accepting the gift of cocaine from a casual acquaintance (admittedly he flushed it down the sink fairly promptly thereafter). He was perhaps lucky to get home safely. This is a lively traveller's tale." Gail Pool of the Christian Science Monitor likewise took issue with Daniels's sardonic attitude, calling him "an unpleasant guide" who "ridicule[s] and insult[s] other Westerners and non-Indian natives"; but, she conceded, the book was "an interesting mix" of "description, history, and anecdote."

Daniels's irreverent treatment of his subject matter has sometimes rankled critics, as for instance in Utopias Elsewhere, which was published in his native England as The Wilder Shores of Marx: Journeys in a Vanishing World. His anti-Communism offended Paula M. Zeiselman in the Library Journal, who called the book "patronizing and condescending … an early 1950s throwback to when 'Commie pinkos' lurked behind every bush." Daniels made it clear in his book that he is no fan of totalitarianism, a fact for which he is unapologetic: "I make no claim," he writes in the introduction, "to have travelled in a neutral frame of mind. But neutrality is not a precondition of truth, which itself is not necessarily the mean between two extremes. One does not expect neutrality of someone investigating Nazism, and would be appalled if he affected it; why, then, expect it of someone investigating a different, but longer-lasting, evil?"

In gathering material for the book, written as the peoples of Eastern Europe had begun to overthrow Communism, Daniels deliberately traveled to the more remote outposts of Marxist Leninism, some of them entirely outside the Soviet orbit: Albania and Romania in Eastern Europe, Vietnam and North Korea in East Asia, and Cuba in the Caribbean. Except for Vietnam, which had a thriving black market that promised to grow into a free market someday, Daniels saw little hope in these countries. Indeed, while Romania and Albania both experienced an end to Communism shortly after he completed his book, both nations have since encountered great difficulties in adjusting to a more democratic form of government.

Because of the restricted nature of these countries, Daniels tended to travel with tour groups of Westerners, many of whom were true believers in communism. Some members of the delegation visiting North Korea, for instance, were liberals concerned over issues such as animal rights; but the majority were "not the kind of people to wax sentimental over the fate of dumb beasts. They were hard-faced communists, who dressed tough and cut their hair short so their heads should appear as bony as possible."

Also pithy are Daniels's observations regarding the triumphs of socialism. Again, because he traveled in extremely controlled countries, he was not allowed to see much in the form of poverty or repression, but what he did see was clear enough. Ruminating, while in Albania, on the state of consumer goods in countries with command economies, he asked: "What, I wondered, is the defining characteristic of communist shoddiness?… What have the tubes of Bulgarian toothpaste on sale in kiosks in Tirana in common with the packets of Czechoslovak soap or East German buttons also on sale there?" After considering various qualities such as skewed labels and rusty metal cans, he concluded that "it is the printing and design of packaging that is most thoroughly characteristic … of communist manufacture. The paper or cardboard is always rough and absorbent, so that ink often sends little spidery strands through it; the calligraphy is crude and inelegant. The labels bear as little information as possible: toothpaste, they say, or soap, and nothing else. This is because the alternatives to toothpaste and soap are not other brands, but no toothpaste at all and no soap." On the other hand, he goes on to say, these labels are not entirely superfluous, since plums bottled in Communist countries tend to be "revoltingly indistinguishable from cherries, olives, apricots" and other similarly small, round items of fruit.

To Ross Clark of the Times Literary Supplement, Utopias Elsewhere is "an excellent travelogue," and Donald Lyons of the Wall Street Journal wrote that Daniels's "synthesizing eye is sharp." He quoted as an example Daniels's description of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro's Havana: "It … is an inhabited ruin; the inhabitants are like a wandering tribe that has found the deserted metropolis of a superior but dead civilisation and decided to make it home." Arnold Beichman of the National Review praised Daniels for "a perfectly timed, different kind of travel book exquisitely written by a practicing British psychiatrist with a sardonic style, a keen eye, and a sense that the struggle for democratic civilization is far from over."

In contrast to Utopias Elsewhere is Daniels's Monrovia Mon Amour: A Visit to Liberia, in which he confronts an autocracy that has nothing to do with communism—one, indeed, that owed its continued existence partly to U.S. support. Daniels, wrote Bill Berkeley in the Times Literary Supplement, "paints a vivid and disquieting portrait…. [He] has a keen eye for the quirky detail and he writes with a wry [Evelyn] Waugh-like scepticism. His portraits of some of the protagonists in Liberia's on-going military stalemate are devastatingly accurate." Alice Joyce of Booklist noted the "cast of appalling characters" with whom Daniels met, including "the maniacal killer General Prince Y. Johnson." The book, she concluded, is "informative reporting on the present-day conditions of this African nation that is required, if painful, reading."

Daniels told CA: "I have always tried in my travel writing to tell the unvarnished truth. Contrary to what some critics have suggested, to do otherwise is true condescension. When Liberians or inhabitants of communist countries tell me they recognize the truth of what I have written, I feel gratified."

Writing as Theodore Dalrymple, Daniels has also published several works dealing with larger social issues. His 2002 Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass is a book that warns, as Peter Saunders noted in Center for Independent Study, that the "underclass culture is spreading through the whole society." Daniels collected columns he penned for the American conservative review, City Journal, as well as his personal experiences as a working psychiatrist in England to present, as a Publishers Weekly reviewer noted, a book "filled with poignant stories of women and men trapped in destructive behaviors and environments." Daniels, a noted conservative, explains that this has been caused by liberal policies that make people passive and too reliant on government assistance programs. For John Derbyshire, writing in the New Criterion, "Dalrymple writes with great clarity, slicing through the common gibberish of the 'official' social sciences with the sword of reductionism." Similarly, Christian Century contributor Lillian Daniel felt that whether one agreed with his opinions or not, the author's writing "jumps off the page with vivid and cutting descriptions."

In his 2005 title, Our Culture, What's Left of It: The Mandarins and the Masses, Daniels presents an equally bleak picture of the modern world. Edward J. Sozanski, writing in the Philadelphia Inquirer, found this work of social criticism "engrossing [and] surgically incisive." Sozanski further noted that Our Culture, What's Left of It, "establishes [Dalrymple] as the George Orwell of the right." Daniels again focuses on the underclass, contending that a rejection of traditional morals and mores has led to the creation of a class that lives with no long-term goals in sight. Thus they often turn to crime and drugs, putting the rest of society at risk. He also focuses on what he considers the wrongheaded approach of liberal policies regarding welfare as being partly responsible for the creation of this permanent and passive underclass. Geoffrey Wheatcroft, writing in the New Statesman, concluded: "Dalrymple has acquired a following on the sarcastic right; if anything, it is the thoughtful left that should be reading him."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Daniels, Anthony, Fool or Physician: The Memoirs of a Sceptical Doctor, J. Murray (London, England), 1987.

Daniels, Anthony, Utopias Elsewhere: Journeys in a Vanishing World, Crown (New York, NY), 1991.

PERIODICALS

Antioch Review, fall, 2005, Jay Martin, review of Our Culture, What's Left of It: The Mandarins and the Masses, p. 795.

Booklist, January 15, 1993, Alice Joyce, review of Monrovia Mon Amour: A Visit to Liberia, p. 873.

Christian Century, March 27, 2002, Lillian Daniel, review of Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass, p. 36.

Christian Science Monitor, March 6, 1987, Gail Pool, review of Coups and Cocaine: Two Journeys in South America, p. B4.

Lancet, August 10, 2002, Kathleen Nelson, review of Life at the Bottom, p. 496.

Library Journal, July, 1991, Paula M. Zeiselman, review of Utopias Elsewhere, p. 119.

National Observer-Australia and World Affairs, spring, 2002, R.M. Pearce, review of Life at the Bottom, p. 70.

National Review, October 21, 1991, Arnold Beichman, review of Utopias Elsewhere, p. 46; June 6, 2005, David Pryce-Jones, "The Doctor Is In," review of Our Culture, What's Left of It, p. 49.

New Criterion, January, 2002, John Derbyshire, review of Life at the Bottom, p. 70.

New Statesman, October 10, 2005, Geoffrey Wheat-croft, review of Our Culture, What's Left of It, p. 51.

New Statesman & Society, April 19, 1991, Douglas Kennedy, review of The Wilder Shores of Marx: Travels in a Vanishing World, p. 32.

Partisan Review, winter, 2003, Robert Silverberg, review of Life at the Bottom, p. 142.

Philadelphia Inquirer, August 10, 2005, Edward J. So-zanski, review of Our Culture, What's Left of It.

Publishers Weekly, October 22, 2001, review of Life at the Bottom, p. 67.

Spectator, July 23, 2005, Digby Anderson, "The Barbarians within the Gates," review of Our Culture, What's Left of It, p. 40.

Times Literary Supplement, June 20, 1986, John Ure, review of Coups and Cocaine, p. 674; March 29, 1991, Ross Clark, review of The Wilder Shores of Marx, p. 22; July 31, 1992, Bill Berkeley, review of Monrovia Mon Amour, p. 9.

Wall Street Journal, May 11, 1992, Donald Lyons, review of Utopias Elsewhere, p. A8.

ONLINE

Center for Independent Study, http://www.cis.org.au/ (February 8, 2006), Peter Saunders, "The Spectator in the Breast of Man."