The second half of Mann's tale provides a fascinating portrait of how auto workers responded to GM's offer to keep Van Nuys open if and only if workers agreed to the new cooperative labor relations. When GM executives sent a new plant superintendent to Van Nuys armed with a proposal to involve workers in management, upgrade worker skills, and provide workers with varied jobs, auto workers faced a dilemma: What GM was offering seemed to be just what workers wanted, but could they trust the same company that had just been threatening their livelihood? Moreover, GM wanted workers to give up protections they had fought long and hard for, but the company would make no long-term commitment to keep Van Nuys open. Its founder may have been the first emperor of China, Qin Shi Huang, in the 3rd Century BC, from whom the word China derives. Considering that both Germans and Japanese had atomic weapons programs (the latter covered up until a few years ago, a widespread atomic final act to that war wasn't a mad notion. Lobotomy was celebrated in the press and was endorsed by distinguished psychiatrists, neurologists and neurosurgeons. It's just the book a parent can spread across the lap, child and all, then read umpteen times with pleasure. . For this we can thank the word processor and computerized type-setting. The verses are as charming and the rhymes as outrageous as ever.
Marguerite Yourcenar, author of these "Oriental Tales" is the first woman member of the French Academy, that society of 40 "Immortals" that has been perpetuating itself and French culture for 300 years But Yourcenar is an American citizen. A woman standing beside her penthouse telescope: "The world down there is scary. The coverage is vast: everything you ever wanted to know about economics from administered prices to zero-profit conditions. The "canons of classical psychology" can contribute usefully to illuminating a saint's life-as Erik Erikson has shown on the Protestant saint (Luther) or Elizabeth Goerres showed in her brilliant and inspiring study of Therese de Lisieux. Oh I know: Science is a club steeped in orthodoxy and dogma; it takes an outsider free of all that rigorous training to think creatively.
Regan's "For the Record: From Wall Street to Washington" The former White House chief of staff's book, for which HBJ paid $1 million, will now be in stores by May 16. Native survivalists, hyper- macho paramilitary bands that follow the teachings of an Ayn Rand/Soldier of Fortune prophet named Holn, are the Vikings and Tatars of this new Dark Age, pillaging at will, enslaving women as concubines and gelding men as serfs. On balance, however, this chapter does offer some interesting insights into how one large company works. Consumer advocate, author "Unsafe at Any Speed) and general purpose consciousness-raiser Ralph Nader has teamed up with William Taylor, a former feature writer for the Hartford Advocate, to give us in "The Big Boys" an up-close and personal view of nine major business leaders-seven of them CEOs of large companies. Her father is beaten to death in a tavern brawl; her mother abandons her and her two brothers to be cared for by an aunt and uncle. The "recovered" woman becomes a stranger to her, disavows the past, retreats into conventional activities and, against the Mennonite pacifist codes, buys a gun to declare war on the groundhogs burrowing through her garden. An article on the American Film Institute by Lawrence Kerr reads like a promotional piece for the organization. Phillips' novel, "Mojo Hand: An Orphic Tale" first printed in 1966, is an often moving woman's blues lament in literary form.
The trouble is that when you win a race this way, you get no breeze in your face. We get a wonderful portrait of Olga, even though none of her letters are printed. He often identifies himself as being black and gay, for instance, but only hints at his feelings of alienation; he speaks of some of his homosexual encounters but doesn't tell us about the scarcity or abundance of affection he feels for men; he admits checking into a mental hospital and telling the psychiatrist, "I feel like I'm coming apart at the seams" but this is the first and last we hear of such desperation. On the other hand, there's a subplot, involving Margaret's abortive romance with a Unitarian minister, that might well have sustained the novel all by itself. And until the venerable Seifert won the Nobel Prize in 1984, none of his 30 published volumes could be found in Prague's nearly 300 bookstores.
Don't rush out for MURFLES AND WINK-A-PEEPS: FUNNY OLD WORDS FOR KIDS by Susan Kelz Sperling, drawings by Tom Bloom (Clarkson N Potter: $7. 95; 44 pp, ages 7 to 12. In the 1950s, Harold Rosenberg looked at the works of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, Mark Rothko and Franz Kline and remarked that what was on the canvas "was not a picture but an event" Soon afterward, the term "action painting" became part of the language To some, this was an apology for confusion. The novel would have been better served if he had shucked the authentic diction and simply written in a contemporary approximation of Fielding's style (if you are going to pretend that you're Fielding in the 20th-Century, you might as well write 20th-Century prose. NEW YORK — HOW DO YOU SAY IT IN YOUR LANGUAGE? Founded in 1985 by Ann Getty and Lord Weidenfeld, the Wheatland Foundation has set up a new Wheatland Translation Fund. Only her mother's dearest friend, a woman who has renounced the Mennonites and lives in France, can help; sh.
This work eventually won renown in philosophy as the "Treatise on Probability" But it failed on initial submission to secure Keynes a fellowship. His sheer physicality-whether talking about being drunk or bug-bitten, describing a meal or a woman, utterly belies Taylor's 75 years. There are a lot of newcomers on the street: sociologists, historians, literary critics, anthropologists; a polyglot population without as yet a sense of community. With the likes of casehardened Marshall Henry (Holdfast) Plummer, "likkered-up" J D. There already exists a field within which this diverse population can live in polyphonic harmony: semiotics, the study of signs. Suddenly everything is in motion: Perspectives shift; mirrors distort; pictures change shape; open paths turn into cul-de-sacs.
The problems of a larger society affect this family only insofar as their property is flanked by a prison, and the prison wall runs like a seam through the land and the novel itself. Since then, the standard of living for the average American family has fallen, and the nation's worldwide military predominance has been irrevocably lost. "What the large majority of Americans believed in-individualism, limited government, free markets-the corporation scorned and worked against. There's something in these pages even for those who aren't interested in reading Jack Williamson's classic stories about adventures in magic castles, battles with giant crabs or basketball-size artificial worlds whose days equal seconds of our own time. The boy's questions about Mexican-Americans confounded him back then and serve as the inspiration for his adult investigations today.
Stableford and Langford's history is basically a series of technological developments, tricked out with an accompanying political history that sounds like a parody of traditional encyclopedia style. These twinned lives-Arai and Matsukata-are well-told episodes of human energy, vision and achievement Their presence would flatter any family tree. Something in the midst of one entry will lead the mind inevitably to another article, and that to a third, as the specialist reader wonders how the clash of theories and interpretations will work itself out. In each instance, Gabriel details how failures in military planning and, especially, intelligence gathering and processes led directly to predictable defeats. A boy who was unhappy even before his dog Keds was accidentally killed puts his mind to complicated algebra problems-his homework-in the aftermath of the dog's death.
Harry Sturdevant, a specialist in sports medicine and a believer in genetic memory. Canin makes us feel what he feels, using what is known as "deceptively simple" prose. You feel, reading, that Sillitoe has earned a right to the anger that smolders here. At several points, Gerald and other characters question the reality and necessity of an audience in art. Hence Scribner's elegant reissues of Alan Paton's classic novel of South Africa, "Too Late the Phalarope" and his short stories from the same crisis zone, the aptly named "Tales From a Troubled Land" The "timeliness of their themes" was what prompted Scribner's to reissue the 1953 novel and the 1961 collection of short stories, vice president Susan Richman reported. Sexual relations between black GIs and British women and the boom of brown babies The rapes and assaults. The author packs power into her narrative only as one who has lived it can.
An unlikely guru, de Man was celebrated for his rigor and ruthless "intellectual honesty" for his brilliant thrusts in debate (a Yale colleague likened him to the fencer in The New Yorker cartoon who neatly cuts off his opponent's still-smiling head, and for the purity of his devotion to literary theory A cult of worshipful acolytes had formed around him The adulation continued for four years after his death. Such is the intelligence of Steele's approach that I wish she had gone further into the '80s: The book only briefly mentions the new star of the haute couture, Christian LaCroix, for example. The fallout from this action almost swamped President Francois Mitterand's government; it cost two high-ranking officials their jobs and damaged France's image in the South Pacific. He also appreciates the contributions that many of his patients have made to an understanding of their own conditions.
Almost 40 years of subsequent association with the mild beauty of the Navajo culture and with various Pueblo tribes whose religion burdens them with social duties deepened that skepticism. Burgoyne is often evil, to be sure, trespassing on other lives, packing a pistol and daring his hosts to resist. The bare bones are not unfamiliar-how the search for security and fulfillment of one group in South Africa has led to the domination of all the others. An unlikely guru, de Man was celebrated for his rigor and ruthless "intellectual honesty" for his brilliant thrusts in debate (a Yale colleague likened him to the fencer in The New Yorker cartoon who neatly cuts off his opponent's still-smiling head, and for the purity of his devotion to literary theory A cult of worshipful acolytes had formed around him The adulation continued for four years after his death. He sent her flowers with his ice cream money (he must have been about 7) and had a note from her. KEVIN STARR, Inventing the Dream, California Through the Progressive Era (Oxford University: $19. 95. Kevin Starr's still unfinished history of California began with "Americans and the California Dream" In this second volume of that history he directs the larger part of his attention to Southern California, for reasons that he sets out in his preface: How hauntingly beautiful, how replete with lost possibilities, seems that Southern California of two and three generations ago, now that a dramatically different society has emerged in its place. In fact, such incongruities raise few eyebrows among an elect separated out from "the world" who nonetheless see themselves as exemplary Americans.
But Schmookler, recently the subject of an Esquire feature, is not a historian but a postulant public philosopher who wants nothing less than that the superpowers should understand their dilemma in the context he has provided and address it accordingly A bold ambition, but this is anything but a timid book. Another De Villiers was a transport rider on the route of the Great Trek, the exodus that took Afrikaners away from the British rule in the Cape Province. When they landed in 1794, some of the French did welcome the exiles, but more of them were very unfriendly indeed, and the campaign ended in disaster. Emmanuel Bove's neglect may be partly ascribable to his death in 1945: a year when literary attention was focused on the future Also: His sensibility belongs very much to his own time "My Friends" reads like an archetype.