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Books: The Struggle of Ideas

DARWIN, MARX, WAGNER — Jacques Barzun — Atlantic — Little, Brown ($2.75).

Paganism, streamlined and arrogant, has reconquered more of Europe than it has held for a thousand years. Yet even among Christians, few people think of World War II as a religious war—Europe's greatest since the Franks beat back the Saracens at Tours. This oversight and the pagan success has a common cause. What it is can be found out by reading Darwin, Marx, Wagner, a 420-page study of dominant ideas and intellectual climate of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries by...

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RAY KELLY, New York City Police Commissioner, on the arrest of a New Jersey man in one of the nation's most baffling missing-children cases, the disappearance more than three decades ago of 6-year-old Etan Patz.
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