Burton Rascoe, for example, a celebrated critic, had said that "The Divine Comedy" was "no more worthy of admiration than a carved replica of the battleship Maine assembled inside a bottle" but he found "Lo" by Charles Fort one of the great books of the world. Clearly, they are easier to observe, and it is easier to measure their behaviors. A thorough Soviet report of events that led to Chernobyl was released to the international community and contributed to a U. S. "If socialism is ever to become a major force in America it must either enter deadly combat with and destroy the convenant myth or must look for some way of making its vision of the good society seem a fulfillment of that myth" Harrington impales himself on the same point, arguing that socialists must make peace with liberals and must convince liberals that socialism is the next logical step for them. Growing older, he tries to break out and become a gentleman of pleasure; but his pleasures are ungainly and dull. There is the modern feminist fable in a story starting as long ago as 1923, when a group of women assert tribal strength-and a vengeful sense of justice-to overthrow a corrupt male regime enjoying female slavery and oppressive taxation. The Hasidic rabbi forbade the marriage: Kafka was not an observant Jew.
"The Education of Mingo" chronicles an elderly farmer's misguided attempts to acculturate his newly purchased African slave. Journeying from New York to San Francisco, our narrator, his family and a friend pass through nearly a city per page in this 1966 work, Gilbert Sorrentino's first novel. Having seen executives involved in situations like that which Roderick faces, I am inclined to be a bit more sympathetic. The small but plucky side-wheeler hauled smallpox vaccine, contraband weapons and important personages up the Missouri. They lived quite well, but it was partly by scrimping and partly by invitation.
Blacks? They labored loyally in Britain's colonies, played wonderful cricket, worked the factories of Bolton and Liverpool And then there was this Joe Louis fellow from America. The de Man scandal has also made people wonder again about the attractions fascism evidently held for upper-class European intellectuals in the 1930s (see Page 6, that "low, dishonest decade" in W H Auden's phrase. 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. How ego, ambition and pretension ran rampant through Hollywood, creating Hollywood's greatest flop.
Dunnigan and Bay, military strategists who have worked for the Pentagon and the Army War College, wrote this book to place "present and potential wars" in their proper context. "Mire el rostro de la vida y de la muerte" the first stanza concludes. For another, he keeps himself as active or passive as the conversation requires and seems to have no ego to be bruised or vaunted, no theories to defend or axes to grind. White paper and a new black typeface were introduced; rose was used for the endpapers and as one of the illustrative colors. But in his effort to have us get under his character's skin, he gives Miriam a voice that is polemical, self-absorbed. But-because if there is a God, He surely must dote on setting up skirmishes between the Good and the Bad, the Bright and the Dull-the director of the zoo, a certain David Raboy, was far from impressed by this show of drawings. Archibald Higgins is an earnest fellow struggling to understand the principles behind Euclidean geometry.
Warner, whose earlier work on the Virgin Mary cult and Joan of Arc foreshadowed her current fascination with the iconography of women's bodies, ranges from ancient Greece to the New York subway of our own times Both have cautionary tales to tell. No issue touching Israel's establishment has been more subject to conflicting claims than the origins of what came to be known as the Arab refugee problem. Necessarily schematic and compressed, these poles of an as yet unwritten system of ethics draw a certain substance from the extended critical discussions to which the book is mainly given over. Peter Cameron was 23 years old when he sold his first story to the New Yorker.
The most advanced nations saw no way to help this most primitive one, but a less technological society found a solution. Intelligence might, for example, refer to the computer's ability to distinguish between two possible meanings of a word in a sentence. This caustically witty first novel by Maggie Paley, a former editor of Life and other distinguished publications, depicts four narcissistic women who swap lovers and confidences with total nonchalance. Instead, the state attorney general in Arkansas seemed faintly embarrassed to have to defend a state law that called for "a balanced treatment" in science classes between evolution and "scientific creationism" A parade of scientists came forth to testify to the validity of evolution and to denounce creationism as religion, not science. When he backs out of a threesome, two girls and himself, he issues a considerate apology to Henry Miller for his timidity.
The laconic Cyril Scott observes himself glad to have found "someone who didn't bore me" Afraid of boredom, inclined to bohemianism, the couple returned to America to join the denizens of Greenwich Village, where Evelyn Scott would begin to publish seriously and where her subsequent life, at home and abroad, resembles a parody of the avant-garde. William Coolidge, the inventor of the vacuum tube, is mentioned. The world's law was no law for her mind" This would seem to signal the author's intention pretty clearly, and in fact, it does. Havel is the best-known Czech playwright, a dissident in his country many years before the Prague Spring, and a leader in the protest movement ever since. More than half of these stories come from literary magazines. "Night and Hope" based on the author's own experience as a child in the Terezin concentration camp, collects seven stories: A woman struggles to retain her dignity despite her slow death; children band together after their family units are shattered. Still, poetry keeps sneaking in- As in an airless room a curtain Parts to admit the evening breeze, So John's exhausted and uncertain Tension admits a transient ease.
A millionbillionwillion miles from home Waiting for the bell to go. Unlike most denizens of the press box, Angell works at a leisurely pace. Spence (Norton: $65; 204 pp) is a book that makes you want to clap. Now Arion Press of San Francisco has added a splendid dimension by offering the heroine Rose's adventures in a rose-red round format, together with a more conventional square-shaped essay on its publishing history, "The World Is Not Flat" For whimsical effect, there is a red-and-blue balloon-all three packaged together in a rose-pink box. What emerges is not a college-level survey of signs and symbols from smoke to sacrament, but an extended dissection and explanation of questions that concern semiotics today: Do animals understand signs as such? Are concepts private signs? Why are we able to talk about past and present, the real and the unreal, casting a net of significance over both?Philosophy these days has all the marks of a changing neighborhood.
That massive structure in the heart of what is now Mexico City was a monument to institutionalized murder. Jails exist, says Irwin, to guarantee that we need not do either. "Now I've learned to take whatever I have in the oven and put it in the refrigerator overnight. Only her mother's dearest friend, a woman who has renounced the Mennonites and lives in France, can help; she writes to Dovie, and between them, they collaborate to preserve the memory of the woman they both love. Elegant, economical, evocative-these terms describe Janet Kauffman's short novel, "Collaborators" the story of a very special mother-daughter relationship. As things stand now, the authors contend, environmentalists are unable to mitigate long-term damage caused by environmental exploitation Instead, activists must combat "fresh horrors almost daily. But "Mothers of Invention" reveals just as much interest in the homely butter mold maker-and the ingenious currency counterfeiter and the zany designer of a "self-cleaning house-as in the Nobel laureate physicist.
As well as "The Invasion" she has published "The Wife of Martin Guerre" (1941, "Against a Darkening Sky" (1943, "The Trial of Soren Qvist" (1947) and "The Ghost of Monsieur Scarron" (1959. "Peaceable Nature" is a translation and revision of the original German edition published as "Die friedfertige Natur" "Peaceable Nature" presents Lackner's philosophy of life: Biosophy, based upon the premise that nature is fundamentally a system of "cooperation and love, not combat" Only about 5% of the deaths of all organisms are violent, avers Lackner; the remainder die peacefully of sickness, exhaustion, old age. As perhaps one might anticipate from a veteran print journalist, Malcolm is particularly unkind to the rival medium of television, never missing an opportunity to remark on how obtrusive were TV cameras and reporters, how superficial was television coverage. It is plainly, even roughly told, with little apparent art of the magical realist to come. Yet they are overwhelmingly content in their work, competent and committed to an explicitly religious calling they see as the last best hope of America. O'Connor, Stephen Minot, Daniel Curley, Scott Sanders, David Long-and by writers who seem to have slipped into obscurity, or at least long silence, since their appearance-John Stewart, Lester Goldberg, Robert Henson-in this series.
It puzzled him and prompts the second most eloquent thing he says: "In my case, heroism consisted solely of not allowing myself to die of hunger and thirst for ten days" His most eloquent remark adds a note, I think, to the literature of survival. Our national comity, our willingness more or less to put up with each other, is sustained by those moments and conditions that help the belief along. Onondaga County, New York-the county that employed David Raboy, operated the Syracuse Zoo and owned Siri the elephant-prepared to sue David Gucwa for ownership of the elephant art" This is the love story of two men and an elephant. As a friend who read the Israeli edition of the book remarked, "It told me things I would rather not have known" But what happened nearly four decades ago left a deep imprint on Israeli society and national attitudes. Mixing vague diabolism with steamy sex in Chicago's Irish Catholic aristocracy, the story concerns a beautiful but tortured art dealer who struggles against repressive church doctrine and her own weird demons to find happiness with a gruff but giving police official she knew as a child. They have succeeded, demonstrating that books can do more than study past wars and provide 20/20 hindsight. Military officers must be willing to fight for the nation rather than for their individual advancements or services.