Books Briefly
Books Briefly FBI: AN UNCENSORED LOOK BEHIND THE WALLS, by Sanford J. Ungar (Atlantic-Little, Brown. 682 pp. $14.95). On late-night television you can still catch the reruns of the old,...
...Afro-American and Amerindian novels are included...
...Callahan was fired a few weeks ago, and Ungar's book makes clear that there is much room left for further improvements...
...Larson charges Western reviewers with literary chauvinism...
...As a communist—on the Italian, rather than American, model— Green gives credit to his comrades for the role they played in unionizing the unorganized, but he is much too charitable in overlooking their political zigs and zags in tandem with Soviet foreign policy...
...Fortunately they did not acquire Lardner's notorious addiction to alcohol...
...As well as lore, there are maps and sensible tips for travelers, plus breath-taking color photographs...
...Radical innovations in these novels are not aberrations but contributions to the evolving canon of world literature...
...4.50...
...Ring Jr., now sixty, once a Communist and a member of the "Hollywood Ten," went to prison for contempt of Congress (he refused to testify about other Communist Party members...
...Perhaps some Americans are still being ensnared by the myths carefully constructed over almost half a century by the late J. Edgar Hoover and the formidable and frightening bureaucracy he fashioned...
...305 pp...
...Labor leaders are overpaid and underzealous, and some are about as liberal as the president of Exxon...
...Perhaps the reason few books on labor are published these days, suggests Gil Green, is that the labor movement "lost its sense of mission" more than a generation ago...
...Yet it is somehow disappointing, for he fails to explain Ring Lardner's genius as a humorist-satirist...
...An insightful critical work...
...John, the eldest and a gifted sports writer, died at forty-eight of a heart attack...
...17.50...
...Often forced to market his work to Western publishers, the Third World writer must satisfy two audiences...
...Among the many FBI insiders Ungar managed to interview—and from whom he elicited revealing statements—was Associate Director Nicholas P. Callahan, "the epitome of the Veteran Hooverite," who boasted that the Bureau was so close to perfection ("98 per cent") that there was no room left for improvement...
...Larson's arguments are deft, his style thoroughly readable...
...He dwells on the changing character of the working class and the effects of automation, monopoly, and the multinationals on the labor movement...
...THE DESERT, by Russell D. Butcher...
...His vivid writing gives the reader a sense of the desert "atmosphere of time suspended...
...THE NOVEL IN THE THIRD WORLD, by Charles Larson (Inscape...
...In part it was inevitable as prosperity spread...
...Green's book is a refresher course on how the sense of mission that electrified the nation during the sitdowns and other strikes of the 1930s was dissipated...
...12.95...
...He must adapt his writing to Western concepts while remaining true to his own culture...
...His memoir is moving, informative, and imbued with affection for his remarkable family...
...Green's analysis, especially his two chapters on "the labor establishment," are valuable insights on a neglected subject...
...201 pp...
...Even a sensitive and observant son, who loved and admired his father, seems unable to penetrate the man's strange, almost scornful reserve...
...THE LARDNERS: MY FAMILY REMEMBERED, by Ring Lardner Jr...
...There is scarcely a paragraph of Lardner's," Edmund Wilson once wrote, "which in its irony both fresh and morose, doesnot convey the sense of a distinguished aloof intelligence...
...WHAT'S HAPPENING TO LABOR, by Gil Green (International Publishers...
...128pp...
...But even those of us who never succumbed to the myths, and who have kept up with all the sordid recent revelations of FBI crimes, can learn much from Sanford Ungar's detailed, meticulously researched study of our Government's secret police force...
...Nevertheless, for those who still have that old dream about labor's potential, this is a down-to-earth, informative book...
...371 pp...
...Ring Lardner (18851934) and his wife had four sons—John, James, Ring Jr., and David, all of whom inherited from their gifted father a talent for writing, a taciturn disposition, and an appreciation of the ridiculous...
...16.50...
...He reminds us that in the Third World—just as in the West— culture shapes form...
...Conservationist Butcher does not glamorize deserts but he is intensely responsive to desert beauty—and desert dangers...
...Introduction by Morris K. Udall (The Viking Press...
...in part it was due to the incompleteness of the CIO "revolution...
...James was killed in the Spanish civil war, where he fought with the Lincoln Brigade...
...David, a war correspondent for The New Yorker, was killed in Germany in 1944 when his jeep hit a mine...
...On late-night television you can still catch the reruns of the old, oh-so-heroic FBI melodramas...
...Harper & Row...
...In this informative tour of the six major desert areas in the United States, Butcher captures what Morris Udall calls the "majesty and infinite variety" of desert spaces, plants and animals, geological formations, scenic areas, and history...
...he cites the case of an African writer whose manuscript was returned from a publisher marked "Not African Enough...
...The novelist in the Third World walks a lonely pathway," Charles Larson writes in his new study...
...Larson skillfully compares ten novels from various Third World cultures...
Vol. 40 • September 1976 • No. 9
