PERSON TO PERSON

Harmer, Ruth

Person to Person Walk Together, Talk Together, by Katharine T. Kinkead, W. W. Norton. 104 pp. $3.75. Reviewed by Ruth Harmer "Touring the past two decades youth has become one of America's most...

...Sholom Aleichem as well as Faulkner, Freud as well as Eichmann, are among his subjects, and he has an essay on President Kennedy, "The President and Other Intellectuals," that will surely be read long after the New Frontier has been written into the history books...
...Although one-third of the foreign students are on full scholarship, there are indications that too many candidates are still drawn from the upper economic levels at home and abroad...
...Established in 1948 by the organization that distinguished itself in World War I for its service to wounded troops, the A.F.S...
...Foreign hosts have sometimes bolted their doors more firmly after experiences with propagandizing, proselytizing, patronizing visitors from the United States, many of whom have been vaccinated so successfully against foreign people and foreign ways that they were never really away from home...
...about 180 were accepted...
...program now functions through twenty-three foreign offices, partly supported by the State Department, and through about 2,100 local committees in this country and overseas...
...Candidates are carefully screened, as are the families with whom they stay and the communities in which they live...
...Demand has become so great that in Germany last year more than 6,000 teenagers applied...
...office, with a secretary and several workers...
...It includes some moving essays on the great Nineteenth-Century American writers (Melville, Emerson, Thoreau, and Emily Dickinson) and those European writers (Camus, Mann, Lawrence, and others) whose vision of experience has clearly affected Kazin's own approach to both literature and life...
...Surely it would be possible for some organizations with similar aims to cooperate more fully so that more money could be spent on the undertaking at hand and less on the overhead...
...Kinkead says that no country may start a school program which does not have a permanent A.F.S...
...seems a victim of such institutional needs as expansion and proliferation: Mrs...
...The youngsters who have participated in it have often broken through the barriers that separate "us" from "them" with such ease that one can only marvel at the shoddy structure of the national, religious, racial, and economic attitudes that have served to divide the family of man for so long...
...The embassies have not always been fortunate...
...schools and lived with U.S...
...In spite of those flaws, the book is important since it offers the "little" everyones a chance to do something while the "bigs" continue to play with their nuclear gadgets and growl low in their throats—something that may well help to set the world's course more firmly toward brotherhood and peace...
...Some aspects of the program should be considered carefully...
...Walk Together, Talk Together is only a beginning of the exploration of this important subject...
...Young Mormons have accepted their missionary obligations with such zeal their church now has important outposts in such unlikely places as Uruguay, France, and Australia...
...The result is not only a brilliant, constantly illuminating account of current writing but a book that can take its place beside the few new works that really tell us something about the way we live and think...
...One reason why Kazin's essays are so continuously absorbing, even in cases where one disagrees categorically with his evaluation of the writer concerned, is the sense he gives of taking up the struggle where the writer leaves off, of pressing upon the...
...Seemingly hastily constructed, it gives the impression of having been written in takes in a newspaper city room...
...In many cases, however, the young travelers have been America's most successful diplomats, effectively replacing suspicion and enmity with admiration and respect...
...in the 1961-1962 school year, 2,222 youngsters from forty-nine countries attended U.S...
...The American Field Service Student Exchange Program, with which Walk Together, Talk Together is concerned, has achieved an enviable record in building person-to-person bridges between nations...
...aloofness of persons who have known Americans only through a movie screen darkly...
...It is not easy to cast a sharply critical eye on an organization whose program has elicited a letter of gratitude from a Spanish army officer for the opportunity given his son to become acquainted with American ideas of freedom and one from an "old Nazi," who said that his differences with Americans had been largely, settled because of the kindness and generosity accorded his son, Fritz...
...And to some extent the A.F.S...
...During the first year, seventeen youngsters from four European countries took part...
...Kinkead's enthusiasm is so obvious that the book frequently gives the impression of being a publicity brochure...
...But Mrs...
...Reviewed by Ruth Harmer "Touring the past two decades youth has become one of America's most strategic exports and imports...
...For Contemporaries, in addition to surveying many of the most interesting books of the last few years— books by Saul Bellow, J. D. Salinger, Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, Robert Lowell, Bernard Malamud, Dylan Thomas, Philip Roth, Lawrence Durrell, James Baldwin, and others—also ranges widely on history, sociology, and the literature of psychoanalysis...
...It deals with politics, taste, and our whole style of life in a way that reminds one of the earlier books of Edmund Wilson (to whom Contemporaries is dedicated) and H. L. Mencken...
...The hallmark of Kazin's style— somehow one is never tempted to speak of his "method," as one would with a more "scientific" critic—is his concern for the way the mind of a writer must struggle to convey the truth of his experience of the world and yet make of that struggle an image that is utterly independent of the chaos that may lie behind both the experience and his compulsion to come to terms with it...
...Other youthful sectarians have been crusading vigorously far and near...
...Thousands of unsolicited testimonials testify about the effectiveness of the program...
...Scout tours and encampments, Peace Corps activities, and a dozen other programs—have been equally busy about their global business...
...families...
...Young guests have also frequently been alienated, resenting exploitation by unscrupulous tradesmen and chilled by the...
...Non-sectarians—through the American Friends Service Committee work projects, Fulbright study grants...
...ing has the kind of pressure, empathy, and play of ideas that one expects of literature itself...

Vol. 26 • September 1962 • No. 9


 
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