These New Yorkers love to chat, and the novel consists solely of their saucy, uninhibited telephone conversations with each other. But success, power and glory were not inevitable, as they had sometimes seemed when HRL was enunciating the American Century Time Inc. He acknowledges virtually none of his sources, and when he cites previous work, it is to explain why he ignores it. "Oscar Wilde is probably remembered first and foremost as a great, almost legendary victim" writes Martin Fido in Oscar Wilde: An Illustrated Biography (Peter Bedrick/Harper & Row: $9. 95, an often chatty but always authoritative study of the life and times of the celebrated 19th-Century literary eccentric. Some of the matters he most fretted about-protection of Social Security, resumption of arms-control negotiations-later became part of the Reagan legacy.
The New York Times broke the story a few days after last Thanksgiving. Lobotomy was celebrated in the press and was endorsed by distinguished psychiatrists, neurologists and neurosurgeons. A sense of humor, Udall contends, can allow a politician to take the punches while still remaining receptive and responsible to the people. Easier said than done, of course, but, after graduating from a teacher's college in Auckland, New Zealand, Ashton-Warner practiced what she preached-not in a comfortable position in a suburban school but in a remote area of the nation's North Island, where she and her husband set up a school for native Maori children.
Canin's story originally appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, as did two other "Bests"Lily" by Jane Smiley, and Peter Meinke's "The Piano Tuner" Meinke's story is a decreasingly comic vision of paranoia borne out in the menacing person of a coarse intruder who arrives to tune a piano and stays to bully its owner. It may be the immigrants who will help resolve the ingrown class-conflicts. He sets out the shape and effect of an emotion; he does not embody it. Thus, the newer work devotes five pages to the topic of industrialization, and 22 to game theory-a subject that didn't exist when the current editors were born. Yet an information gap remains, for, while broadcast media might capture our interest by dramatically reporting developments in the last 24 hours, they fail to provide the historical focus that can further our understanding of why people are fighting in the first place.
The organization of the book requires frequent use of the extensive index (38 large pages of small type. He looks like Everyman (at 70) in his plain suit and polka-dot bow tie, with bald head, tufts of white hair over his ears, and white mustache Mr Milquetoast. The next coincidental encounter comes in a cafe after a funeral, 10 years later. Among the cast of characters is a frail, sad, nearsighted boy nicknamed the Professor because he steals only books, reads them and becomes an imaginative storyteller who will, years later, tell "the story of their lives and many other stories of men who struggled and suffered" As in his other early novels, politics underscores the narrative, which comes to a less-than-believable close. To read her is to read someone who has been a child, sibling, friend, spouse and parent, and who has clearly cared as deeply about these aspects of her life as she has about those aspects connected with her art Lewis' biography may be briefly summarized. Clayton Eshleman's "The Name Encanyoned River" reveals a poet who has persisted in searching for the essence of consciousness. What is missing from the book is the man's personality, the exciting quality of his classes and his dedication to actors and to the arts.
Like the good journalist that he is, Broad gets inside people. Like Dan Wakefield's recent "Selling Out" this work of fiction was inspired by its author's labors in the Hollywood TV vineyards. MOST REMARKABLE NAMES by John Train (Clarkson N Potter: $9. 95. It was the beginning of the 40 years of the apartheid regime Now it's Botha's pragmatism against Treurnicht's principles The parallels are there for all to see The politics of fear have mobilized Afrikaners before. The community depended on slaves, women were in short supply, newcomers off the ships regularly called in at the company's slave lodge that doubled as Cape Town's semi-official brothel. Too far for its own good, despite the passion and wit with which it is done. If these books were recordings, Beranek's would be a taut, intense performance captured in good mono sound, while Forsyth's would be an atmospheric and gentlemanly reading processed to audiophile standards.
He also issues a stream of minute instructions about what she should be doing. Mayta emerges as a splendidly vivid character, wreathed in uncertainties He is one of Vargas Llosa's finest creations. First serial rights for the wildly popular TV daddy's book have been sold to Good Housekeeping for $90,000, with second serial rights going to the National Enquirer for an undisclosed sum. But it's also a whale of a story-one that covers the Hollywood scene from the early 1950s to the 1970s as the three Wyman siblings (two girls, Sky and Sara, and the boy, Vail) alternately love each other, are consumed with interfamilial jealousies and are all unmercifully manipulated by their mother, Diana, the sort of stage mother who, as Dracula did with the bat fraternity, gave both vampires and stage mothers such bad names. in Two Worlds" which makes up half the title is a clue that Bly is not only speaking of human relationship but also of an enigmatic, inner realm. Bill Moyers, in his superb TV documentary "The Secret Government" aired last fall, made the case for the second; namely, that the American empire is a threat to constitutional democracy at home.
but not Marie Curie, who invented what we now call the 'Geiger' counter and discovered radioactivity. By now, the national taste for precious and exotic foods seems to be nearly satiated. Their motivations are laid out like road maps, their depths examined in headlights that point only to the end of the story and leave the characters themselves almost as indefinable as the occupants of a vehicle on a dark road. (Elson, it is also clear, had the additional advantage of being able to write in the past tense by anywhere from 40 years to a decade at least. But Luce, whose Time, Fortune, Life and People have influenced other forms of journalism as well as the magazines' readers, fades very quickly from Volume Three, written by Curt Prendergast, a veteran Time foreign correspondent, and Geoffrey Colvin, a Fortune editor, in succession to the retired Elson. Marigold in turn rescues Mark by shooting an enormous white tiger plumb between the eyes and is viewed with awe. Now he reveals himself as human and old, and full of aches and pains and alarming symptoms, and frightened of the world of geriatric medicine, with its endless tests, overzealous doctors, intimidating nurses, Rube Goldberg machines and demoralizing paper work His cartoons are the same.
The message of "Letters to Olga" might be: "Show them how a phenomenologist can withstand jail" Vaclav Havel's writings from four years in Czechoslovakia's prisons possess a wit, a serene toughness and a capacity to extract humane sermons from stones that could convert me. Motivated and formed by the accidental shooting death of the author's wife, this novel tells the story of a seduction in Mexico in the 1940s. The protagonist, Daphne, is so embarrassed at not having a date for Christmas, that she turns down all invitations To the author, she is a specimen. Its very persistence is to him a graphic expression of the extreme dualism of men's attitudes toward women: "The most beautiful, desirable woman of her time, focus of tens of millions of erotic fantasies, is cast as guardian angel of the most destructive weapon in history" "The Painted Witch" is a man's account of what men have done unto women in the name of art during 500 years of European history. Our nation was thriving, but the common sense of the corner-store owner just didn't seem up to the task of running behemoth bureaucracies in the corporate age.
This is a hopeful insight on Paula's part, since her adult life has already taken on several characteristics of her mother's. But the Indian subcontinent is not every armchair traveler's cup of Darjeeling, and for other adventurers, there is an eclectic selection exploring such delights as the Japanese bath and the gardens of Versailles China by Hiroji Kubota, foreword by Jonathan D. History becomes " His story" Science manifests the handiwork of God's creation, and mathematics shows its orderliness. "Find out what the facts are, and make your own decisions about how to live a happy life and how to work for a better world" The point here is Pauling's prescription for good health, and it's an appealingly simple one. Ford Maddox Ford, Wyndham Lewis and Pirandello, to mention three among dozens, are treated with a respect that will doubtless bring them new readers. "Human beings" he writes, "if only to maintain a sense of self-respect, have to be persuaded" Morgan's theories about the creation of consent are the most interesting in the book, creatively integrating ideas from anthropology, psychology and religion. Both approaches have their uses and their devotees, and while I am glad to have both books, I also know of which one I would part with last. .
a spontaneous mutation-the definition of the title's "Sport of Nature" Hillela has no sense of convention, and the South African laws based on "skin and hair, the relative thickness and thinness of lips" hold no meaning for her. But nothing, after all, could be easier: James Jones' defects are mostly on the surface. The "conversion" of the famous wolf of Gubbio has been recounted hundreds of times because there is nothing else to do with it; we haven't the evidence to sustain scientific inquiry. His language is an invigorating interweaving of hieratic and demotic English and everything in between. A convert to the Sikh religion, Khalsa divides his time between designing computer software, running his ashram (spiritual retreat, meditating and marketing a product called "Foot Sweaters" This look at the latest visions of the American Dream is entertaining and well organized. For the cop, no one is presumed innocent-that luxury is left to the (usually soft) judge and jury. "Alethia" recounts a bizarre interlude in the life of a black, middle-aged philosophy professor who reeks of the lamp.