BOOKS
BOOKS Paul Robeson Rediscovered David R. Roediger PAUL ROBESON SPEAKS edited by Philip S. Foner Brunner/Mazel. 624 pp. $17.50. PAUL ROBESON: THE GREAT FORERUNNER by Editors of...
...Hard cover $25...
...The fine, playful intelligence animating this piece makes reading it exhilarating at times...
...In her introductory essay, Diamonstein puts the preservation movement into perspective and offers a few caveats...
...After the war Robeson continued to draw a parallel between racism at home and colonialism abroad...
...I had no alternative...
...it would carry wonderfully as a radio monologue...
...The development of Robeson's thought can best be reconstructed through Robeson Speaks, which groups the singer's writings and speeches chronologically...
...By 1934 Robeson wrote, "I want...
...After the war many honors were bestowed on Baeck...
...The British economy, critics charge, is sick...
...This edition also contains Stone's "Reflections Thirty Years Later," a poignant reaffirmation of ideals he believes have been betrayed by today's government of Israel...
...Philip Foner's Robeson Speaks constitutes the first major collection of Robeson's written and spoken words...
...While Baker did not know Baeck personally, his biography, based upon five years of research, reveals information hitherto unknown...
...275 pp...
...It is a well-documented, thoroughly discouraging picture of cumulative inequality...
...The essays in The Great Forerunner help to put Robeson's many writings and activities into context...
...93 pp...
...Foner's work, which gathers articles from widely scattered and sometimes obscure publications, deserves high praise as an aid to scholars and as a fine introduction to Robeson's ideas...
...That dirty word 'class' American Class Society in Numbers, edited by Bob Howard and John Logue (Kent Popular Press, Box 715, Kent, OH 44240...
...The Great Forerunner, produced by the editors of the civil rights journal, Freedomways, offers several important essays assessing Robeson's impact on sports, culture, and politics...
...He totally escaped self-pity and opposed retribution...
...The resulting book, Underground to Palestine, helped mobilize public opinion in the United States to support creation of the state of Israel...
...Historic destiny called Baeck to enact his own lifelong philosophy...
...With a few strokes, she evokes a whole way of life, life as "lifestyle": "Look at all this stuff I've got in my head: rockets and Venetian churches, David Bowie and Diderot, nuoc mam and Big Macs, sunglasses and orgasms...
...Sontag makes the desperado vision sing...
...While some of the information here is easily accessible elsewhere, this handbook pulls together data on the distribution of income, wealth, tax payments, education, crime and punishment, health care, and political power...
...A modern saint DAYS Or SORROW AND PAIN...
...Restoring the old BUILDINGS REBORN: NEW USES, OLD PLACES by Barbaralee Diamonstein Harper & Row...
...Nonetheless both books represent major contributions to a growing literature on Robeson...
...Weaving through this piece are fragments of another story, involving her father, who died in China, her inaccessible mother, and her own memories of a childhood in which China represented the happy place at the other end of the tunnel through the world...
...In "Project for a Trip to China," the narrator looks forward to her visit to a mythological China that, in her Westernized mind, stands for goodness, simplicity, and the pleasures of solidarity...
...Beyond the discomfort and the extremes of heat and cold, she conveys her sense of exhilaration in the vast silence: "This stretching of self beyond stretchable boundaries, this glory of being where few have stood, of listening and seeing, of feeling the sun and the rock, somehow matters very much...
...One can hardly quarrel with his reporting that goes beneath surface phenomena, whether he is watching Ulster terrorists of both factions turn personal profit on the side, or linking to racism the "bizarre cult of soccer violence" with its immense property damage any Saturday afternoon...
...In an amazing eighteen pages the "poor moneyed wretch" Julia drifts through despair, three black women named Doris cope with crime and poverty's griefs in that other Manhattan, and the narrator, refusing to give up, affirms an urban ethic...
...Sontag's stories I, ETCETERA by Susan Sontag Farrar, Straus & Giroux...
...He must elect to fight for freedom or slavery...
...Both books suggest that the new interest in Robeson since his death in 1976 must not be confined to obligatory bows toward his achievements on the stage and screen...
...When another rabbi with the same name was shipped to the crematoria, Baeck's name was crossed off the records...
...Stuckey's interpretations seem likely to set the agenda for further studies of Robeson's thought...
...Neither of these two volumes is beyond criticism...
...The campaign of political repression associated with Senator Joseph R. McCarthy provides a partial explanation, but in Robeson's case the State Department was a larger factor...
...Nossiter argues that the British have made an unconscious collective choice for a more relaxed style of living instead of higher material consumption...
...Harnessed to a wagon to draw garbage during the day, he continued in the dark of the night to lecture on theology and philosophy amid indescribable misery...
...press, especially after Roger P. Ross, American vice-consul in Ghana, called for unfavorable publicity to lessen DavidR...
...Most are sketches meant to question whether fiction is capable of grasping the world as it is...
...One wonders whether Nossiter, in his eagerness to disarm the prophets of British economic doom, has not made simple industrial inefficiency into a virtue...
...She writes luminously and movingly of an actual Manhattan alive with the actual miseries of recognizable lives...
...These trends include the growth of activism which has brought with it political pressure against destruction of landmarks, a new awareness of values and history, and the decline of modernism...
...However, he was determined to remain with his flock in their darkest days when they, helpless victims of a megalomaniac, were shipped to the gas chambers of Auschwitz...
...Endowed with an amazing vitality, he devoted himself to assisting in the rehabilitation of survivors and to lecturing at universities in Europe and the United States...
...These old cathedrals of transportation, once a focal point of city and small-town life, are solid and impressive in contrast to the sleek airline terminals which have supplanted them...
...In an introductory article Paul Robeson Jr...
...The current union rebellion against Prime Minister Callaghan's wage restraint reflects just that...
...A composer's life Stravinsky in Pictures and Documents, by Vera Stravinsky and Robert Craft (Knopf...
...Ulster and race are not imaginary ills, but serious, potentially dangerous ones...
...396 pp...
...The Great Forerunner, also attractively illustrated, contains many tributes to Robeson...
...The writings in Robeson Speaks are of such consistently high quality that it may seem surprising Robeson is not already recognized as a major Afro-American thinker...
...Readers familiar with Stone's penetrating political analysis will discover, in this new edition, that he is also a superb reporter, and that his story still makes compelling reading after a third of a century...
...Most of her book is devoted to photographs "before and after" of ninety-five reborn buildings or neighborhoods around the country with brief histories and descriptions of the projects...
...The half century between his first book and his last marks the spiritual odyssey of the man who sees Judaism as a unique phenomenon which defies the usual categories of thought and existence...
...But Sontag's best fiction belies the premise that character is dissolving...
...In the late 1920s and the 1930s, as Robeson's stage career blossomed, he embarked on a scholarly investigation of the spirituals and of African culture...
...I do not share Nossiter's faith in the long range success of current economic policies...
...Susan Sontag's new book, /, etcetera, consists of eight stark, pared-down pieces of fiction...
...For a time Robeson's antifascist and anti-racist concerns were actively shared by many Americans...
...Stone (Pantheon...
...He had a style of speaking and writing all his own...
...255 pp...
...The figures relating health care and illness to level of income are particularly striking...
...His very power as a performer his artistry on the football field, the stage, the screen, and in the concert hall led many to dismiss his opinions as those of an artist who was at best instinctively hankering for justice and at worst sorely misled...
...Selections from Robeson's early adulthood, during his tenure as a Phi Beta Kappa undergraduate at Rutgers, breathe with idealism and the desire to excel...
...Nossiter is an astute and sprightly observer of the British scene...
...688 pp...
...Appropriately, the show opened during the autumn at Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art, which is housed in a building once a bakery...
...His was an intellect of titanic scope which moved with equal sovereignty in the classical literature of Rome and Greece, the writings of patristic and scholastic theologians, and the literature of India and China...
...In "Forge Negro-Labor Unity for Peace and Jobs," for example, Robeson spoke glowingly of "180 million of our African brothers and sisters and sixty million of our kindred in the West Indies and Latin America" as allies in the civil rights movement...
...Though uniformly adulatory, they provide broad coverage and significant insight...
...246 pp...
...Because they have opted for more leisure...
...In the huge glut of books about the Middle East, this one is a must...
...Robeson and DuBois, the two black leaders most conscious of Africa, were discredited not merely for their radicalism but also for the two qualities creative genius and old age, respectively which would have caused others to look to them for guidance in the African societies they admired...
...She is versed in the history of this lonely desert country and intersperses that background with her detailed descriptions of plants, animals, and birds discovered during often stressful and hazardous climbing...
...It is, he suggests, something that may happen in other advanced industrial countries as well when basic material needs are satisfied...
...Especially interesting set against her wartime essay, Trip to Hanoi, the story is a brilliant montage of scraps, including personal reminiscences and quotations, doubts about literature, and doubts about anything else...
...Some are kept offstage entirely...
...and the preservation of a central district of elegant Nineteenth Century buildings in Helena, Montana...
...Exploring desert country Wind In The Rock, by Ann Zwinger (Harper & Row...
...Though Ulster is the bleeding wound, the problems of race affect far more Britons...
...14.95...
...Old Complaints Revisited" is about an unnamed but menacing organization...
...Leonard Baker's biography (Days of Sorrow and Pain...
...She points out that a number of political, economic, social, and philosophical trends converged to give the movement "an enormous push" in the past decade, when interest in preservation has become a fundamental element in city planning...
...Miraculously his life was saved...
...That doesn't have to happen...
...The point, I take it, is to show that both therapist and child are superfluous to the family madness, but the point would better be made in the sort of essay Susan Sontag writes so lucidly, or in the hybrid form of "Trip to China...
...Some of the best known undertakings are here, including San Francisco's Ghirardelli Square, Boston's Faneuil Hall Marketplace, and the Charleston, South Carolina, historic preservation...
...There are also many projects that are relatively unknown, which indicates how widespread the preservation movement is...
...Irony is one defense against pain, but lyricism, passion, and historical clarity are more generous...
...The repression of Robeson's ideas could hardly have enjoyed such success had it not dovetailed so neatly with Western notions regarding the political commitment and intellectual rigor of the artist...
...At the age of seventy-two Baeck was deported to a concentration camp in Czechoslovakia...
...In April 1945 Adolph Eichmann, Hitler's "deportation specialist" in charge of "the final solution," discovered the error and ordered shipment of Baeck to Auschwitz...
...As well as pointing up these problems, Diamonstein acknowledges that economics must be considered...
...Or because of poor management, bad industrial relations, and the like...
...15...
...to be African...
...I quote from "Debriefing...
...The most provocative of the Forerunner essays, Sterling Stuckey's "The Cultural Philosophy of Paul Robeson," is a masterfully researched account of the way in which Robeson's search for a national identity in the African and Afro-American past became transformed into a "brief against Western values" and ultimately helped to commit the singer to "world cultural revolution the proper balancing of the emotional and the rational, under some form of socialism...
...LEO BAECK AND THE BERLIN IEWS by Leonard Baker Macmillan...
...he also challenged the cultural arrogance of the West with a withering critique of materialism...
...Does the relatively large amount of material from the 1950s reflect editorial choice in emphasis or the greater availability of writings from that decade...
...As one who has witnessed the conflict, Nossiter is pessimistic about the consequences for Britain: Ulster "stimulates dangerous political ambitions among some officers, erodes civil liberties, and develops a calloused official attitude toward outrage and untruth...
...Paperback $10...
...Together the two books establish Robeson as a significant Afro-American thinker and facilitate the writing of a history which can gauge the sources and the boundaries of Robeson's inspiration...
...Diamonstein selected the projects from literally thousands, in small cities as well as large, that have been carried out...
...Highly readable and informative...
...And it should be required reading for those who write political commentaries on the United Kingdom...
...the conversion of the railroad station in Yuma, Arizona, into an art center...
...British life is a more pleasant, a more civilized existence than that in other industrial countries, and its value is appreciated by management and labor alike...
...Architecture," Diamonstein notes, "is called the 'inescapable art,' but many of our proudest old buildings escape from us every year, making way for routine office buildings or rectilinear condominiums or, worst, parking lots...
...He is writing a book about the New Left and the mass media...
...Why has the rate of growth been lower as well...
...He < never used translations or secondary sources...
...These include the impressive conversion of the sturdy waterworks and powerhouse in Columbus, Indiana, built in 1903, into a senior citizens center...
...the staccato paragraphs are stunning...
...In most of the other stories, though, the scraps don't add up...
...He reached the height of his human destiny as the leader of the half million Jews who were German citizens in the tragic years of the Nazi era from 1933 to 1945...
...Why are the British unable to compete...
...In this captivating account, naturalist Ann Zwinger describes her backpack adventures in exploring five canyons of Grand Gulch Plateau in southeastern Utah...
...In 1946, I.F...
...Irony wins victories too easily...
...This accelerated development is documented by Barbaralee Diamonstein in Buildings Reborn: New Uses, Old Places, a book supplemented by an exhibition of the Smithsonian Institution to appear in twenty-two cities over three years...
...Baker presents not only the story of Baeck's life but a portrayal of his philosophy of religion which was influenced by Dilthey and Kant and was anchored in the traditions of Jewish humanism and German idealism...
...Reading them is hard work, but when the feelings fill out and the historical situation becomes clear, the results are glorious...
...There is a bibliography of sorts which is a scathing criticism of inaccuracies in some books interpreting Stravinsky...
...9.95...
...The writers find only one area of real equality: tax payment...
...In this case irony doesn't overwhelm Sontag's deep affections, her commitment to perseverance as a moral quality...
...Unlike textiles, shipbuilding, and the like, the automobile industry remains thoroughly dominated by the industrial West...
...Nossiter debunks the trendy view that Britain is an economic and political basket case before turning to what he views as Britain's real problems: the erosion of political morality through the Troubles, as they are quaintly called, in Northern Ireland...
...M anfred swarsensky (Manfred Swarsensky is the rabbi emeritus of Beth El Temple in Madison, Wisconsin...
...When someone once asked him whether he could ever forgive the Germans, he replied, "It is for the Germans to forgive themselves...
...the book is handsomely illustrated with her fine drawings...
...Stone's journey Underground to Palestine, by I.F...
...rather, irony makes that commitment all the more poignant...
...His agitation against lynching and for early civil rights laws always touched on international affairs as well...
...Yet one is left questioning Nossiter's optimistic appraisal...
...Leo Baeck is less known in this country than are other modern Jewish theologians such as Martin Buber or Abraham Heschel...
...Britain is obviously not on the verge of collapse, but is it really about to become the post-industrial model nation, selling services, especially culture 03BC productions, the London theater, education) to the rest of the world while labor and management alike lead a more relaxed existence...
...When the news of his death in London in 1956 reached the land of his birth, the president of the Federal German Republic, Theodor Heuss, wrote: "Leo Baeck was a wise man, an aristocrat of mind and heart, a member of mankind's true nobility a saint in our time...
...In cities and towns across the country, people are saying "no1' to the ravenous wreckers and rapacious real estate developers who have been laying waste to substantial old buildings and city districts...
...As Foner observes, Robeson praised the Soviet Union at least as much for its aid to colonial movements as for its internal achievements...
...The last trend, along with nostalgia, may account for the large number of railway stations which have been preserved...
...Leo Baeck and the Berlin Jews) is written against the background of the history of German Jewry which began some 1,500 years ago at the time of the Roman Empire when Jews first set foot on European soil, a history which came to a catastrophic end with the rise of the Hitler regime...
...To the extent that American society regarded creative brilliance and hard logic as counterposed, it was possible to view Robeson's thoughts on culture and politics as ephemeral and ill-considered...
...260 pp...
...the appearance of racism in urban areas with high concentrations of Asian and West Indian immigrants, and the penchant for secrecy and paternalism of the British political elite, Labor as well as Tory...
...In spite of the new fervor to preserve, Diamonstein warns that many fine old buildings, such as Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin East in Spring Green, Wisconsin, still are in danger of being razed...
...These pieces are too much like Pop Art paintings, bloodless comments about the limits of art...
...His senior thesis on the Fourteenth Amendment illuminates the way in which the desire to see America finally live up to her egalitarian ideals contributed to Robeson's decision to attend Columbia Law School...
...It has taken a long time in this throwaway society to develop an appreciation of what has gone before, but at last an awareness is growing that our resources are not limitless and that the nation must nourish its roots if the plant is to flourish...
...Each insists that Robeson's social and cultural thought shows considerable insight and deserves serious attention...
...258 pp...
...In the modest but successful story, "The Dummy," plot is sharper: a bored, unhappy husband constructs a dummy to stand in at his job and in his marriage, only to watch the dummy fall in love and need a replacement himself...
...Investment levels are reasonably high...
...10...
...In the best of these pieces, Sontag writes with grace about the American intellectual's difficulty in making a home in the world...
...Why should Nossiter so readily concede the demise of the British automobile industry...
...Some, especially the poems by Gwendolyn Brooks and Pablo Neruda, are moving and valuable...
...Further, the differences in wage and employment rates among races are much smaller than in the United States, and the National Front, the white supremacist party, should, barring cataclysmic change, remain only "an ugly excrescence...
...383 pp...
...To the British the Irish of Ulster "are regarded as a savage, inexplicable people, little more comprehensible than warring factions in Angola or Zaire...
...In a 1937 speech at a rally to aid young refugees from Spain, Robeson summed up his commitment and concern: "The artist must take sides...
...8.95...
...At the same time, she is Western, an individualist, and suspicious of her longing to dissolve herself...
...The Forerunner essays begin to place Robeson's activities in a historical framework...
...Class" is a dirty word in the American political vocabulary, and statistics on class are hard to find...
...Conversely, his writings in Freedom and for the Council on African Affairs sought to educate Afro-Americans to the necessity of support'..his writing...sought to educate Afro-Americans to the necessity of supporting African liberation' ing African liberation...
...The social service network functions well...
...The picture of a pathetic Britain, chronically floundering, terminally inefficient, and now politically unstable, has taken its place alongside those of an efficient and authoritarian Germany and an affluent but soulless Sweden in the ranks of journalistic cliches...
...There is some element of truth in every stereotype, but, as Bernard Nossiter, The Washington Posfs London correspondent, demonstrates in Britain A Future that Works, that kernel of truth concerning Britain is small...
...35...
...Some preservationists," she writes, "unwisely pooh-pooh the issue of costs...
...When Nossiter tries to explain them, he ultimately finds himself arguing that the two factions are so tribal in their loyalties and so far apart in their aims that low level terrorism is preferable to a settlement...
...Robeson's influence on African liberation movements...
...the remodeling of a handsome Greek Revival hotel in Windsor, Vermont, into a multiple-purpose building...
...Unguided Tour" is a string of cliches about tourism...
...There he kept* on strengthening the morale of his doomed congregation which in the course of two years had shrunk from 50,000 to 700 because of starvation and deportation...
...Yet Britain is falling behind economically...
...Robeson Speaks, meticulously edited and handsomely illustrated, should have included some discussion of the criteria used in the selection of Robeson's writings...
...These stories, like the title, are trying to tell us, I believe, that character today hardly exists, or should exist...
...Ernest Kaiser's lengthy and trenchant annotated bibliography in 77ie Great Forerunner marks that volume too as an invaluable aid to students of Robeson...
...Here Britain is not a warning but something of a model...
...The biography covers the composer's years in Russia, Switzerland, France, and most vividly the United States, and it traces his transitions in musical style...
...To him, not creed and dogma bu\ the uncompromising fulfillment of moral and social postulates, even at the price of martyrdom, is the essence of the Jewish religion...
...The British scene BRITAIN A FUTURE THAT WORKS by Bernard D. Nossiter Houghton Mifflin...
...Roediger, a graduate student in history at Northwestern University, has contributed articles on black history to Science and Society, Journal of Ethnic Studies, In These Times, and Southern Exposure...
...His answer is polemical, but given the nature of his target this seems appropriate...
...Some characters appear without names (an "unnamed Austrian-Jewish refugee sage who died in America...
...Lavishly illustrated and handsomely printed in oversized format, this compendium by Igor Stravinsky's widow and collaborator is a feast for the eye...
...Prior to the current recession, the British economic track record has been good by historical standards, though below that on the Continent, and North Sea oil will eliminate the perennial British balance of payments problem that has been the cause of stop-and-go economic policies...
...12.95...
...In the masterpiece, "Debriefing," we get both characters and historical setting...
...ToddGitlin (Todd Gitlin teaches sociology at the University of California, Berkeley...
...strikes are rarer than in the United States...
...Not only did he link the misery of the colonial world to the racism and exploitation perpetuated by the colonizers...
...Britain A Future that Works is a stimulating book, and a useful antidote to the diet fed us by the press...
...People like myself who knew Baeck as a beloved teacher at his and my alma mater, the Academy of the Science of Judaism in Berlin, and as an intimate friend feel particularly indebted to Baker for a comprehensive biography of this unusual man who, through his valor under fire and his uprightness under martyrdom in the midst of the recrudescence of paganism, preserved our belief in moral greatness...
...Stone, then a reporter for the New York newspaper PM, embarked on an adventurous journey: He accompanied a group of Jewish "displaced persons" survivors of the Holocaust on a clandestine voyage from Eastern Europe through the British blockade to their new homeland...
...it comments ironically on its disembodied prose, but the comment doesn't save the story...
...It is effectively begun by the two volumes considered here...
...Even so, Nossiter believes the British tradition of tolerance will stand the country in good stead...
...This link between oppressed Americans and colonized people is a far mote dominant theme in Robeson's postwar writings than his more publicized defense of the Soviet Union...
...The task of placing Paul Robeson in history, while not so colossal as the man himself, promises to be a substantial one...
...When Federal, state, local, and Social Security taxes are combined the total is not "progressive": The rich and the poor end up paying about the same proportion of their income in taxes...
...Especially influenced by his contacts with Welsh miners and British socialists, his visits to the Soviet Union, his participation in anti-fascist activities during the Spanish Civil War, and his disillusion with Hollywood's racism, Robeson came to connect the oppression of various groups with the unchecked power of capital...
...In "Baby," a married couple in therapy speak alternately to an absent therapist about a mysteriously upsetting child...
...Among the finest of the essays is John Henrik Clarke's analysis of the relationship between Robeson's cultural studies and his opposition to colonialism...
...At the age of eighty-one he gave his last lecture on the medieval philosopher Moses Maimonides at the University of Frankfurt...
...The history of the capitalist era is characterized by the degradation of my people...
...but without clear character and clear historical setting, fiction tends to taste like chicken soup without chicken...
...Favorable mention of Robeson's writings became rare in the U.S...
...Baeck wrote many books and essays but is best known for his magnum opus, The Essence of Judaism, a phenomenology of the Jewish religion written when he was thirty-two years old, and for his epitaph, This People Israel, an apotheosis of the Jewish people written during the time of Nazi persecution...
...Baker's description of Baeck's attitude after liberation is deeply moving...
...Taxes, while higher than American rates, are in line with those on the Continent...
...The real economic question, Nossiter believes, is why British productivity is lower than that on the Continent or in the United States and Japan...
...Comparing "Debriefing" with the skimpier, more obsessive and schematic stories, I learn this lesson: "Here's a solid conservative rule, deposited by Goethe with Eckermann: 'Every healthy effort is directed from the inner to the outer world.' Put that in your hashish pipe and smoke it...
...At a time when many Afro-Americans hastened to forget their slave past and when most scholarship portrayed Africa as backward and benighted, Robeson embraced his heritage...
...1.75...
...Nossiter examines the arguments of a variety of recent critical academic and pseudo-academic studies of Britain...
...DuBois during the 1950s...
...no one else I know has written with such brilliance and care about middle-class Manhattan life in the era of heroin and junk food...
...The influx of West Indian and Asian immigrants began in the 1950s and reached massive dimensions during the economic boom of the 1960s...
...Books Briefly I.F...
...How much of Robeson's published work is represented...
...Others are overly long and of small importance...
...Summoned by his coreligionists at the moment of their greatest agony to head the "Reichs Union of German Jews," it fell upon the aging rabbi to preside over the liquidation of the oldest European Jewish community...
...Most of the figures are drawn from official Government studies...
...PAUL ROBESON: THE GREAT FORERUNNER by Editors of Freedomways Dodd, Mead...
...While the detailed documentation occasionally becomes didactic, this is an absorbing account of a complex human being with a subtle mind and many idiosyncracies...
...a string of cliches intended ironically tends to sound arch...
...The real British problems lie elsewhere...
...That does the movement no good and could cause it some harm.'1 While Buildings Reborn is no polemic, its message is clear, even inspiring...
...As Robeson identified more closely with Africa he also offered a maturing criticism of Western society...
...And that's what her book is all about...
...He could have saved his life by accepting offers to teach in England and the United States...
...The "Social Contract" and its various reincarnations have been more successful than might have been expected, but the skilled labor force cannot be expected to accept declining real incomes and the erosion of pay differentials indefinitely...
...There is bitter irony in the situation of Robeson and of W.E.B...
...gives a solid summary of attempts to discredit his father and illuminates the singer's essentially African refusal to separate feeling and intellect...
...In essays like "Primitives," "The Culture of the Negro," and "I Want Negro Culture," Robeson articulated an early version of black pride and joined DuBois, Carter Woodson, and Melville Herskovits in arguing that a vital African heritage enriched the lives of Afro-Americans...
...Charles-Gene McD aniel (Charles-Gene McDaniel is a freelance writer based in Chicago...
...She warns, too, that dangers lie in the "boutiquefication" phenomenon, in the cheapening of restoration (such as drippy candle shops), in "gentrification" (wherein established residents are forced from neighborhoods), and in "museumiza-tion," which mummifies buildings and often neighborhoods...
...In this single story, by giving herself over to her caring, and to her sense of where we are in history, Susan Sontag has produced something of great beauty and human force...
...JohnLogue (John Logue is a political scientist at Kent State University...
...It suffers from malicious unions, inefficient managers, antiquated plant, and a government which, instead of undertaking the necessary but painful cure, promotes a demoralizing welfare system funded through debilitating taxes...
...Diamonstein, a former White House assistant and director of cultural affairs of New York City, is a commissioner of the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission and its Cultural Affairs Commission...
...Race relations have been exacerbated by economic stagnation and high, unemployment, by the "traditional ostrich posture" of the Labor party and the unions toward racist groups (which was not abandoned until 1977), and by Margaret Thatcher's recent departure from the Conservative tradition to make racism politically respectable...
...A day later, however, Russian troops captured the camp...
...331 illustrations...
...They are strange, uneven pieces, most of them closer to ruminations or hallucinations than to stories which take distinct characters through a distinct world from a beginning through a middle to an end...
...His voluminous wartime writings, which held that the defeat of fascism would have to be complemented by full citizenship for black Americans and by the liberation of colonial possessions, apparently, however, made little impression on postwar policymakers...
...They must struggle to overcome the attitudes within themselves that allowed the flourishing of Nazism and the acceptance of the holocaust...
...Baeck was not only a theologian but also a practicing rabbi and a teacher as well as a scholar and an author...
...During World War II Robeson could savor the critical acclaim which greeted his historic starring performance in Othello...
Vol. 43 • March 1979 • No. 3
