Originally dedicated, Gilbert said, "to Avital and her husband in the hope that they would be 'swiftly reuinted' " the biography now will be dedicated to a group of other Soviet Jews still imprisoned in that country AIR-CONDITIONED NIGHTMARE. As a stylist among jazz writers, he may rank with the late Otis Ferguson, the New Yorker's Whitney Balliett, Gene Lees and not many others. The job of chronicling recent war developments, thus, has been left to more rapid-fire media: TV and radio news. Provoked by what he calls "my sadness about the forces of disintegration that have overwhelmed so many couples today" San Francisco clinical psychologist Jon Welwood now gives us Challenge of the Heart: Love, Sex and Intimacy in Changing Times (Shambala/Random House: $9. 95, a spiritual balm for the walking wounded of the war between men and women. " Sometimes she goes for the jugular: "Last night the wind had gusted around the farmhouse, and Judd lay forever propped on the bed, facing a loud TV, drinking" Pulling images from a cultural grab bag as overstuffed as her favorite Woolworth's, Lottie Jay dishes out a sassy-voiced perspective that is quite a tonic for a reader dined long and lean on the clipped, coked sentences and stylized emotions of the Manhattan novel currently in vogue among publishers. 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.
Jones writes about a contemporary domestic battle that suspiciously echoes the hard-drinking, raucous, masculine tone of a James Jones novel. "Smiles on Washington Square" ultimately, is just another academic novel. . The cross-references, and the concluding subject index, are more of an invitation to savor the richness of "The New Palgrave" than an aid to the uninformed. As he prepares to keep his wife and daughter captive in their "ideal redwood" home in an addled plan that may escalate into their, and his, destruction, he reflects on his life and times. Payne's Strategic Defense: "Star Wars" in Perspective (Hamilton Press, 4720 Boston Way, Lanham, Md 20706: $9. 95. 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.
Even the leaves of wintered-through oaks seem in the twilight a future brown Breezes signal, then signal back Black are the bushes. Discomfortingly, much of what happens to him is his own fault and in the end, our response is an appalled amusement as it becomes clear that illusions born of poverty and solitude are likely to perpetuate these. "When Jim Crow Met John Bull" was initially published in England last year and constitutes the first major analysis of this 1942-45 period of Anglo-American confusion. What politics has taught feminism, on the other hand, is that public policy counts. First, 10 years ago, was the period of welcomed but uneasy quiet. Finally, this book is not about happy endings any more than Greek tragedy is. A number of them are spinsters or widows, women in middle-age whose struggle against the end of passion produces odd extremities, half real and half spooky.
Seuss' fantastic contraptions, while a mechanical hand presses his head against the eyepiece, to read a screen of letters of increasing size: "Have you any idea how much money these tests are costing YOU"At 82, the beloved Dr Seuss has published his first book for adults. His catalogues of imagination improvise the souls of our most everyday objects, bringing them back to life and light as if from the world of our dreams. But the book that Crane was to write was very different from any written by his compatriots. The coverage is vast: everything you ever wanted to know about economics from administered prices to zero-profit conditions.
The verses are as charming and the rhymes as outrageous as ever. Just consider for a moment the implications of a couple of history's "What ifs" What if Picket's men had broken the Union Center at Gettysburg? Would our geographical confines today embrace two nations rather than one? What if Lee Harvey Oswald's second shot had missed? Would we have the consequences of the Vietnam War and the '60s upheaval conditioning our national existence today? Few of modern history's "What ifs" offer ground more fertile to the novelist's pen than those which surrounded the critical D-day landings in June, 1944. But today such fears seem ironic as the American banks, some of them struggling merely to survive, have lost pride of place to the banks of Japan Of the world's 10 largest banks, seven now are Japanese Only one U. S bank, Citicorp, clings to a place (9th) among the top 10. Miss Sophie's Diary and Other Stories by Ding Ling (Chinese Literature/Panda) is the most startling and compelling of four new titles (three reviewed here; the fourth available is "Mimosa" by Zhang Xianliang) from Panda Books, each of which may be ordered directly from the distributor, China International Book Trading Corp (Guoji Shudian, P. O Box 399, Peking, China. Anthony Pietropinto expounds on the use of "Jabberwocky" as a kind of literary Rorschach test: "Nonsense poetry" he writes in "Exploring the Unconscious Through Nonsense Poetry" "may be the poetic highway most parallel to the 'royal road' of dreams" And a group of practitioners working with schizophrenics at a Pittsburgh state hospital report that "poetry can put a wedge into the pathology and defenses of a psychotic" "Poetry as Healer" is written for two audiences. Knopf) "intimately traces the lives of three Boston families" during the urban warfare between 1968 and 1978. The poems in "The Lost World" Randall Jarrell's final book of poetry, were written in 1963 and form a self-contained unit.
Why are we not challenged? Is it that accounts of everyday life have begun to acquire a repertoire of predictable situations? Parallels abound between abandoned women in these tales-but in these vintage years for the short story, the reader wants the inescapable irony-not the formulated one. The stories of Francine Prose are for those with an appetite for the domestic disturbances of modern society and the frailness of human relationships. Carnivals are a good example: "It was a time for the mouse to eat the cat" Morgan writes, "the sheep to eat the wolf, the rabbit to shoot the hunter. Round and billowing, in pink, blue, green and yellow, as if sculptured in ice cream. Her introduction sums it up best: "Women's tennis is a renegade sport, lacking in guidelines, ripe for exploitation, located at the intersection of a parent's unfinished emotional business, a child's fantasies, and a society's infatuation with celebrities, especially the pretty, young, female variety" Stabiner traveled the circuit, witnessed firsthand the agony and ecstasy of young girls not even old enough to spell those words, got into the hearts and souls of the parents, and watched with disgust as adult agents and promoters groveled for the attention and contract of each new Tracy Austin clone to come onto the scene. For one reason, he was a generalist; for another, he held to no particular critical orthodoxy; for a third, and perhaps the most fatal, he was an eclectic enthusiast who believed that literature should both entertain and instruct, and probably in that order.
English and Bible study go hand in hand to the pulpit for a priesthood of all believers obliged to preach and proselytize"You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free" (John 8:32. The old books, the old chivalry that so inspired the knight are exposed in the course of his adventures as untrue, at least in the way he had believed them to be true But they are not shamed or discredited as lies. "We were there from the very beginning" writes De Villiers, "and some of us will be there until the end" The De Villiers family were a lively lot. Ashbery will write of love or passion but they attach to no voice. Their talks are held on the swings in their grammar school's playground, as if to keep one foot dragging in a reassuring past. It seems that he is not content to okay anything with Fonda until it has been done 10 or 11 takes.
Twenty years from now, Mathabane will very likely want to take up his autobiography again I, for one, hope he does. . Also: Swiss dramatist, novelist and diarist Max Frisch has been named the recipient of the $25,000 Neustadt International Prize for Literature. James Oberg sets out to uncover the truth about Soviet disasters for its own sake and because it may have implications for us as well as them Purportedly, he intends "not to gloat but to humanize. 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. It is Chace and Carr's view, furthermore, that empire of any kind is a risky anachronism.
The Promised Land recedes on the dangerous flood of history which brings forth a plague that, locally, takes on the name of Leslie Titmuss-later, the Rt Hon Leslie Titmuss, M. P. The Bible, Croce, geometry, and physics seemed to us sources of certainty Chemistry, for me, had stopped being such a source. 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. At story's end, the narrator finds wife and foster son in bed together, the woman just about to mount the boy, and wanly excuses himself for spoiling their pleasure.
After divorcing Borgnine, she declared that she would never again walk down the aisle, and she didn't. " Which evaluation is correct? And how can the author express such varying views as to what lay behind his subject's actions? For me the answer lies in the position within the book at which we read both extracts. You have to believe this guy was larger than life-probably still is-and must have driven his partner slightly crazy. It was the middle of the Great Depression. The book devotes a chapter to the Star debacle, but no more than a page to the even more costly catastrophe of "TV-Cable Week" the company's vast and unrealistic scheme to publish and sell a customized weekly cable listings guide to cable systems, which would in turn sell it to their subscribers. But what also happened, as Israeli records show, is that thousands of Arabs were forcibly and sometimes violently expelled, both during and after the war, from areas originally assigned to Israel in the U N. As Guinness arrived for dinner one evening, Ralph Richardson slugged him for no cause except that Richardson was evidently displeased with the world at large at that moment After a somewhat offhand apology, the evening went forward.
Yet Charles Murray's polemic against the programs of the Great Society is more convincing than most because he acknowledges that poor Americans do not have ideal access to health care, housing and jobs. Matthew Lesko, who is manning a toll-free number (800-USA-0030) throughout this month to give information "on any topic" offers succinct profiles of major government agencies. For example, Israel asserts that the chemist uncle from whom Lauder claims she got her earliest formulas was not "a very famous skin specialist in Vienna" at all, but rather was Lauder's uncle-from-Hungary John Lotz, whose beauty preparations stood alongside the poultry lice killers, dog mange cures, paint and varnish removers, freckle removers, toothache drops, mustache wax and embalming fluids he also concocted. And yet, although he credits himself with a great sense of humor throughout the expedition, the wry wit in "New York to Nome" takes a handful of decades to ripen. The three older children go off to boarding school to get away from him and spend their vacations with other relatives.
Poor Americans will only become more so without programs like affirmative action The Earth is more factionalized than ever before. With her new novel, "The Good Terrorist" Lessing has returned to the conventional form to explore one of her most persistent themes, which is the difficulty of acting with individual conscience. Yet "World's Fair" like a superior marathon runner, starts in a crowd of thousands and bit by bit-there's Philip Roth, right beside you; and watch out for Saul Bellow's left elbow-is running, not necessarily in front, but unmistakably by itself. Gray's material on mother Nada thus seems fresh, particularly so, since she poses the often unflattering question of how life with a mother like Nada affects a child.