Some of the bestselling nonfiction books published in 1970 include David Reuben’s Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex but Were Afraid to Ask, Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch, Better Homes and Gardens’s book on cooking fondue, and a dense tome on urban affairs called The Unheavenly City by a then-obscure Harvard professor named Edward Banfield.
The success of The Unheavenly City turned Banfield into a minor celebrity and a sort of father figure of the burgeoning neoconservative movement. The book’s argument that most urban problems came from the dysfunctional culture of the lower classes made him the focus of international obloquy. American Enterprise Institute senior fellow Kevin Kosar points out in the foreword to this new edition that when Banfield gave a talk at the University of Chicago, he was shouted down by protesters bearing signs such as “Racist Banfield Wanted for Genocide” and “Wanted Dead or Alive: Edward Banfield.”
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Judge Glock is the director of research and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor at City Journal.
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