BOOKS
BOOKS The cult of the sell Jonathan Cobb THE CULTURE OF NARCISSISM: AMERICAN LIFE IN AN AGE OF DIMINISHING EXPECTATIONS by Christopher Lasch W.W. Norton. 268 pp. $11.95. PERSON/PLANET: THE...
...Their once satisfying marriage unravels into bickering, sexual impotence, depression, emotional estrangement, mutual misery...
...They Should Have Served That Cup of Coffee, edited by long-time activist Dick Cluster, effectively dispels these myths...
...347 pp...
...Malamud has chosen as the core of his novel a subject that could have lapsed into cliche or soap opera in the hands of a lesser writer...
...The "therapeutic sensibility" associated with the growth of psychiatry and medicine encourages self-consciousness about personal development and survival...
...In subverting bigness, we save the planet...
...Reggie Schell, defense captain of the Philadelphia Black Panther Party, recalls that he began to develop political consciousness about the time of civil rights struggles in Selma, Alabama, when he watched "the police beat the women and the children...
...15 hardcover...
...We need an analysis of society and the self that is more balanced than either of these writers gives us...
...If the vaguely fabled revolution was not on the horizon, perhaps it was time to cultivate a community garden, or to work in free schools and clinics, food co-ops, or alternative newspapers...
...But he treats the "excesses' ' of the cult of the self merely as aberrations and does not confront the conservative and mystifying uses to which the ethos of self-discovery can be put...
...Barthelme's surreal reductionism is, in his words, "a gentle, genial misunderstanding...
...She wrote of the small world she knew...
...362 pp...
...Many of today's college students were born in the 1960s...
...The opposite of a rebel, she was "very much suited" to the English gentry of her family and friends...
...The six case studies are well-written, historically grounded, and refreshingly free of the bombast and bluff of a movement's advertisements for itself...
...Those who plan a career in medicine will find concise summaries of duties performed in each sector, qualifications required, even current rates of pay...
...Occasionally elucidating absurdities of society, more often Great Days is gratuitous...
...the neighborhood became easy prey for speculators fixing up houses for Washington's upscale (and mostly white) gentry...
...She evolved into an ardent feminist and recalls, "The most important lesson we learned from both the civil rights and antiwar movements was that no one was going to fight for us until we started fighting for ourselves...
...Cecil believes her touchstone was her comic genius...
...He is currently working on a series of radio documentaries for SANE on the effects of the arms race on American culture...
...377 pp...
...Through a bizarre anthropomorphization of the earth, he urges us to respect the planet's "natural rights" and its "person-hood...
...Journalist Conway (who has contributed to The Progressive) concentrates on the mill workers in the J. P. Stevens plants in Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina, to present her vivid, if chilling, report...
...His forthcoming book, "The Whole World Is Watching: Mass Media and the New Left, 1965-1970," will be published by the University of California Press early in 1980...
...After stardom with Humphrey Bogart in To Have and Have Not there was more than a decade of happy marriage to "Bogie" until his fatal illness...
...Roszak is careful to distinguish what he considers to be the authentic spirit of liberation in "the little people" of society from the image-consciousness of the managerial elite that provides much of the evidence for Lasch's analysis...
...Dubin's adultery creates in Kitty a woman who is more pathetic than sympathetic...
...Roszak argues that a new ethos of "self-discovery" is becoming apparent in our society, that yearnings for personal identity are becoming a "subversive political force" comparable to the passion for equality and the rights of man of an earlier time...
...He still believes that "any community...
...In the end the contributors to Coops, Communes & Collectives agree on the limits of counter institutions...
...He traces the social roots of narcissism to the growth of a mass-consumption economy, the supersession of the old propertied elite by a new ruling class made up of professionals, bureaucrats, and corporate managers, the replacement of the Protestant ethic of work and self-improvement by an ethic of self-preservation, and to a changing rationalization of power which has undermined traditional authority...
...Half of Co-ops, Communes & Collectives is devoted to case studies...
...In the early 1970s, after the New Left collapsed into sectarian grotesquely, thousands of radical and counter-cultural activists went local...
...The advent of the camera and electronic media encourage people to define reality by its reflection...
...It will take a collective effort to reconstruct and restore the history of the 1960s...
...Lawrence, his current subject...
...CO-OPS, COMMUNES & COLLECTIVES: EXPERIMENTS IN SOCIAL CHANGE IN THE 1960s AND 1970s edited by John Case and Rosemary C. R. Taylor Pantheon...
...Young potential activists are led to believe that the mass movements accomplished nothing, that radicalism in the 1960s was shallow, based more on pique than on principle, more on style than on struggle...
...And so, as the 1970s end, a new generation of students who show increasing concern about South Africa, nuclear power, or disarmament is robbed of the lessons of the mass movements that preceded them...
...Activists in the 1960s THEY SHOULD HAVE SERVED THAT CUP OF COFFEE: SEVEN RADICALS REMEMBER THE SIXTIES edited by Dick Cluster South End Press (Box 68, Astor Station, Boston, MA 02123...
...In asserting the human scale, we subvert the regime of bigness...
...At the end one remains as troubled as Kitty and the biographer in trying to grasp the totality of Dubin's lives...
...Conway brings alive the complexities of the mill community and its changing society in skillful interviews with mil...
...Colorful, sensitive reporting...
...while she seemed unmoved by the Napoleonic wars going on in the outside world, her characters are universal types whose conduct she observes with ironic amusement and judges on the standards of virtue, sense, and taste...
...She is more concerned with the effects of participation and consciousness among blacks engaged in the movement than on more narrowly defined measures of victory...
...if neighborhoods will mobilize to provide for themselves, Hess contends, they will make big business and bureaucratic government redundant...
...7.95 hardcover...
...she was "unillusioned" and had a sense of "impish gaiety" about the human comedy...
...A feminist on our times The Possible She, by Susan Jacoby (Farrar, Straus & Giroux...
...Refugee radicals COMMUNITY TECHNOLOGY by Karl Hess Harper & Row...
...Dubin's initiation into some new possibilities of the flesh is rounded out by Malamud's loving and persuasive depiction of his character's basic goodness: Dubin's moral self-awareness and guilt, his sensitivity to the world of changing seasons and relationships, and his ambivalence as he tries to delay his arrival at "the age of aging" by acquiescing to experiences he had almost by-passed while writing "what he cannot live...
...Allen Graubard illustrates how free schools were largely absorbed into the public school mainstream...
...Hess has taken from Kropotkin a belief in our cooperative potential and recreated it in homespun language...
...Joyce Rothschild-Witt specifies conditions for participatory democracy and punctures the conventional wisdom about the iron law of oligarchy...
...These interviews and essays make a convincing case for some movements of that era...
...10.95...
...Still, the reader feels dissatisfied, wondering what finally happens, how it all works out...
...10.95...
...She almost married Frank Sinatra (she cheerfully acknowledges it would have been a disaster) and after her divorce from actor Jason Robards she lost herself in her children and in a stage career (Cactus Flower, Applause...
...Because of his own deep and subtle exploration of his characters' lives, and his vivid evocation of the natural world that surrounds their vulnerable human natures, he has achieved considerably more...
...What happens to activists as they trade off immediate goals and long-run political reforms...
...Regardless of the source, in his "hunger to live many lives" Dubin becomes progressively enmeshed in an affair with Fanny, all the while struggling to remain honest with himself and kind to Kitty...
...As he begins to squirm within the comfort and security of his marriage to Kitty, Dubin finds himself lusting after Fanny Bick, a young college dropout who briefly enters the Dubins' lives as a housekeeping assistant...
...But he concludes that even if counter institutions can't radically change the world, they can help create "a civic culture that is vital for any mass socialist movement...
...Lawrence's troubled life...
...Malamud pushes symmetries almost too far by having Dubin's daughter — Fanny's age — become sexually involved with a married man older than Dubin...
...Imagining himself so thoroughly into the life of his central character (just as Dubin himself has done with the subjects of his biographies), Malamud precisely renders all of Dubin's complexity, inner dissonances, loose ends...
...Unlike other recent writers on the subject, Lasch sees narcissism neither as a voluntary retreat into privatism nor as simply self-indulgence, but as a strategy for psychic survival in the jungle of capitalist social relations which, he argues, have come to resemble more than ever a Hobbesian war of all against all...
...5 paperback...
...Each of the seven contributors was personally moved by or participated in the civil rights movement...
...The lesson of the 1960s," Starr writes, "is not that counter organizations of all kinds necessarily fail, but that in the absence of a general social transformation, they can survive only in certain limited forms...
...The editors recognize that the New Left did not simply disappear but transformed itself after the high tide went out, leaving an array of counter institutions that face common problems...
...unreality, unable to form lasting relationships, and continually anxious to win the approval of higher status persons in an effort to gain a sense of self-esteem...
...Lively reading for anyone interested in what goes on behind the scenes in a doctor's office or a hospital...
...The 1960s did not lead to vast change, but neither did they dissolve back into the 1950s...
...7.95...
...where there is no vision, they go on serving their clientele while losing their radical edge...
...Reading Cecil's book (handsomely illustrated and printed) is a step back in time, and for all the bucolic gentility it is a rewarding experience...
...The ethos of self-discovery, he tells us, "is a spiritual force generated by the planet itself as a defensive response to the bigness of things...
...Wool-worth's closed the counter rather than serve blacks...
...But in his eagerness to demonstrate that ours is a narcissistic culture, Lasch makes generalizations about Americans which often seem more dictated by theory than a product of real understanding of the people in question...
...2.95 paperback...
...Inside the health system Careers in Health, by Barbara Zimmerman and David B. Smith (Beacon Press...
...For all his criticisms, however, Roszak does not appear to want to give up urban or industrial society or science, and he himself appears to recognize the inadequacy of his own analytic categories...
...Three more specific developments have also contributed to the growth of narcissism, Lasch believes...
...IMlMWIIIIIIWWIWIIIIIIIIIIIllWWBaaaMMBWaMWBBM Books Briefly Textile workers and S. P. Stevens Rise Gonna Rise...
...Never strident, she comments with balance and taste on our recent social history...
...But, as Hess writes, the hip whites failed to organize the black majority and were worn down by street crime...
...Journalist Jacoby describes herself as a "pushy, nervy, hard-working kid" who came out of Michigan State I Jniversity in the mid-1960s determined to be a writer...
...Paul Starr argues that the counterculture has devolved into an assemblage of subcultures...
...David Moberg maintains that the counter institutions of the 1960s were "alternative means of reproduction," while the 1970s have spawned "alternative means of production...
...For his portrait of the narcissist, Lasch relies heavily on the psychoanalytic tradition and frequently invokes "the principle that pathology represents a heightened version of normality...
...Editor Dick Cluster, who contributes a chapter on the antiwar movement, began his activism with the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Northern Student Movement, while Steve Rees, who surveys the GI movement, first became active in high school with Friends of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC...
...And it evidently can serve a- an ecologically sound invisible hand: "In seeking to save our personhood, we assert the human scale...
...Working in the mills is a way of life passed from generation to generation...
...In this, Person/Planet might seem the perfect complement to Lasch's analysis...
...Andrew Kopkind traces the histories of Boston's post-underground alternative media as their owners steered them to commercial success...
...Jane J. Mansridge makes a contribution to the political theory of reconstruction with her argument that political equality should be construed not as a goal but as a means to the three goals of equal protection of interests, equal respect, and personal growth...
...228 pp...
...Theodore Roszak, the seeds of a new society...
...While Dubin blooms, Kitty withers...
...They have assembled numerous interviews and revealing firsthand accounts of actual days on the job with health workers...
...One common theme is that alternative institutions run into natural limits unless they can unite in a sweeping political vision...
...Textile workers are the lowest-paid industrial employes in the country (only 10 to 12 per cent are union members), and efforts to unionize the Stevens plants have been hampered by industry harassment and intransigence...
...The awkward title belies a gracefully written collection of discerning essays and reflections...
...In different ways, these two books, Community Technology and Co-ops, Communes & Collectives, help us understand both the possibilities and the limits of the new localism...
...3.95 paperback...
...He finds evidence for this proposition in the recent proliferation of religious cults, psy-chotherapies, and handicrafts where, according to Roszak, people are "coming together in America to work out their liberation" and "to find themselves as persons...
...It is an excellent collection of interviews and essays by radicals who were central in the civil rights, black power, antiwar, and women's movements of the 1960s...
...Smith, chairman of the Department of Health Administration at Temple University, and Zimmerman, a free lance writer, examine the proliferating and increasingly specialized jobs in the country's health system...
...Search for self DUBIN'S LIVES by Bernard Malamud Farrar, Straus & Giroux...
...Barthelme's surreal sketches Great Days, by Donald Barthelme (Farrar, Straus & Giroux...
...community has settled down into way stations on the new, meandering career paths...
...Roberta Rubenstein (Roberta Rubenstein is an associate professor of literature at American University...
...In a quiet, eminently old fashioned study, British literary scholar David Cecil re-recreates the Eighteenth Century world novelist Jane Austen lived in...
...11.95 hardcover...
...a year or two later I began picketing Woolworth's in support of the sit-ins in the South...
...In recalling the roots of the feminist group, Bread and Roses, Ann Popkin notes, "I walked my first picket line with my mother when I was thirteen or fourteen...
...For the narcissist, the world is a mirror, whereas the rugged individualist saw it as an empty wilderness to be shaped by his own design...
...They planted gardens and raised trout — yes, trout — in basement pools...
...The weakness inherent in the attempt to characterize culture is that it can obscure important contrary currents within individuals or between groups...
...By the end of 1960, more than 50,000 had taken part in civil rights demonstrations, and 3,600 people had gone to jail...
...William Dubin, the central character of Bernard Malamud's disquieting seventh novel, is a biographer of some reputation who is attempting to put his own life in order...
...the other half searches for theoretical implications of a decade's work...
...And the growth of bureaucracy encourages performance and managed presentation of the self, since bureaucratic advancement often depends not on any sort of real achievement but on approval of superiors...
...Rising consciousness and the effects of the civil rights movement are reflected throughout the book...
...Of the two books, Christopher Lasch's is the more provocative and important...
...This often lends to his narrative a rambling, confused quality...
...Perhaps, then, the lack of resolution to the novel is inevitable, even aesthetically necessary: there is no way to bring Dubin's story to a close without falsifying the cumulative life experiences Malamud has given him...
...Her book, "The Novelistic Vision of Doris Lessing," has just been published by the University of Illinois Press...
...The dismissal of these developments as narcissistic, he contends, is simply the disgust of the intellectual elite at the popularization of self- understanding...
...Despite these resonances, the novel wavers in its balance of sympathy...
...172 pp...
...Editor Taylor concludes from the history of free clinics that "you can't both provide a better service and mobilize effectively to bring organized medicine to its knees...
...8.95...
...208 pp $19.95...
...Donald Barthelme plays the same game in the sixteen scant, flighty sketches of Great Days...
...A number of good sources are already out of print, or available only in expensive hardcovers...
...Citizen initiative and research will show neighborhoods how to raise food, increase local manufactures, and generate solar energy and electric cars, using such decentralized technologies as minicomputers, intensive gardening, and cybernated machine tools in shared machine shops...
...Whereas Lasch sees the ills of modern American society as capitalism, narcissism, and a collapse of authority, Roszak attacks nothing less than urbanism, industrialism, science, and "bigness" for having profaned the self, stunted human potential, and enforced obedience to outside authority...
...Hess moved to rural West Virginia to try again...
...The authors of these two books share a common perception that authority and civilization in America and, more generally, the western world are disintegrating...
...PERSON/PLANET: THE CREATIVE DISINTEGRATION OF INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY by Theodore Roszak Anchor Press/Doubleday...
...As the media that once puffed revolution now puff neo-conservatism and personal lifestyles, these lucid essays read as healthy and thought-provoking correctives...
...A Portrait of Southern Textile Workers, by Mimi Conway (Doubleday...
...In The Culture of Narcissism, Lasch has reworked and threaded together some previously published essays to outline, sometimes brilliantly if not always convincingly, the social conditions which he believes have made the narcissist the dominant personality type of our time...
...Now in her fifties, actress Lauren Bacall recalls in lengthy detail the highlights of her life from her beginnings as a stagestruck "nice Jewish girl" in New York to the present...
...5.95 paperback...
...The world of Jane Austen A portrait of jane austen, by David Cecil (Hill and Wang...
...Christopher Lasch sees in our valuation of the self a symptom of our culture's decadence...
...But Hess's folksy style blurs big questions: He argues, for example, that production is the basic human need but takes the neighborhood as his fundamental unit of change...
...A mass movement based on direct action and arrests had been born...
...The reader must contrive the scene, for Barthelme provides only short, cryptic situations, often without characters — just voices...
...The media fill the gap with a few images of aging activists, their hearts and minds gone to sex, life insurance, gurus, and the Government...
...The illusion that big business is an efficient provider depends on a passive consumer mentality...
...can, with access to knowledge, develop a technology perfectly appropriate to its needs and...
...They have replaced individual responsibility with welfare, morality with therapy, and patriarchy with a faceless paternalism of the state and the corporation...
...Are such counter institutions the barely visible underpinnings of a possible radical revival, or provisional way stations for the refugees of an imploded movement...
...later his sexual re-awakening stimulates it...
...Hess's communitarian anarchism has a noble lineage, literally so in the turn-of-the-century writings of the anarchist prince, Peter Kropotkin...
...He is co-author, with Richard Sennett, of "The Hidden Injuries of Class...
...They are still active in the 1970s...
...Taylor, an assistant professor and director of community health at Tufts University...
...There is something to be said for the communitarian and anarchist traditions, if not much for the mysticism, that Roszak promotes in Person/Planet, and he may be right that attacks like Lasch's on the collapse of authority help fuel the right-wing reaction, but his view of the valuation of the self is as uncritical as Lasch's is negative...
...239 pp...
...Moberg notes that the new localism has not shown how the old national centralism can be dismantled and has failed to make a case for its ability to run an economy...
...Pablo Picasso would draw three curved lines that vaguely resembled a human nude, leaving the viewer to imagine the lines into a complete image of the body...
...107 pp...
...Unfortunately, Roszak too often substitutes mysticism and counter-cultural cliches for real social analysis to offer us much that is fresh and enlightening...
...Perhaps this is progress...
...Initially his guilt and deception hamper his writing...
...Her views contradict the usual focus on the Albany events as a failure for Martin Luther King...
...Looking back on that turbulent decade, she cites "three genuine radical movements": civil rights, antiwar, and women's liberation...
...Her generous if quirky spirit becomes blunted, crippled, and deeply wounded as she attempts to comprehend her husband's metamorphosis into a stranger...
...The theoretical essays in Co-ops, Communes & Collectives are, for the most part, models of scholarship which is at once rigorous and relevant without indulging in trendy cheerleading or an equally trendy cynicism...
...10.95...
...For Karl Hess, community is chief among the virtues...
...The book's title refers to the fateful sit-in by four black college freshmen designed to integrate Woolworth's lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, in February 1960...
...Theodore Roszak, like Lasch, openly worries that we may be entering a new "Dark Age," but in his new book, Person/Planet, he attempts to show us what is humane and positive in our culture's valuation of the self...
...Perhaps the impetus for Dubin's straying from his set path (even his jogging route is fixed and predictable) began when Kitty started dreaming about her long-dead husband, or perhaps the impetus came from Dubin's vicarious entrance into D.H...
...resources.'' Co-ops, Communes & Collectives, by contrast, is a sophisticated and coherent collection of essays on both Jeff Stern the practice and the theory of alternative institutions...
...The white radicals represented here got their start in the civil rights movement, too...
...How much democracy, how much efficiency...
...workers, the new black and white activists, victims of byssinosis (brown lung disease), bureaucrats, and old-timers who recall mill owner paternalism in more tranquil days before Stevens moved in...
...326 pp...
...Neither author, however, gives us a sufficient enough picture of self and society to allow us to judge properly either narcissism or our culture's prospects...
...These developments, Lasch contends, have not eroded hierarchical social relationships, only hidden them behind an ideological facade of personal growth, participation, and teamwork...
...More than five million people are now employed...
...The probes, disillusions, and retrenchments of the 1970s amount to a continuation...
...Entertaining memoir Lauren Bacall by Myself, by Lauren Bacall (Knopf...
...Her reminiscences of Hollywood include keen observations on movie politics and professional integrity...
...Hess, who with David Morris wrote Neighborhood Power (1975), tells an interesting story of one failure in community autarchy...
...Robert K. Musil (Robert K. Musil teaches a course on the history of protest and culture in the 1960s at Temple University...
...189 pp...
...Thus, "the lower orders," according to Lasch, "internalize a grandiose idea of the opportunities open to all, together with an inflated opinion of their own capacities," and American childrearing is described as "the mechanical quality of parental care, so notably lacking in affect...
...The narcissist, as Lasch paints him, is self-absorbed, uninterested in the past or future, unable to subordinate desire to higher social purposes, possessed by inner feelings of purposelessness and Jonathan Cobb is a free-lance writer and editor...
...Daniel Zwerdling writes on food co-ops, Rosabeth Moss Kanter on urban communes, and Anthony P. Sager on radical law collectives...
...They both link this decline to the premium our culture puts on the self — a premium that has come to be called narcissism — but they do so in quite different ways...
...In this age of psychotherapy and fascination with the self, there is a certain poetic justice in Christopher Lasch's describing our culture by analyzing a personality type within it (although, of course, related attempts to divine "the American character" are hardly new...
...Among the jobs surveyed are those of physician's assistant, emergency medical technician, home health aide, nurse midwife, clinical pharmacist, laboratory technologist, respiratory therapist, clinical psychologist, boarding home operator, hospital administrator, and related occupations...
...In the Adams-Morgan area of Washington, D.C., Hess and other counterculturalists put community technology to work in the late 1960s...
...In a collective version of the voluntarist American spirit, combining the virtues of the homesteader and the garage tinkerer, Hess wants communities to harness participatory institutions to small-scale technologies...
...in community is "a material base for local liberty...
...12.50 hardcover...
...The publication of They Should Have Served That Cup of Coffee by the new, alternative South End Press is a concrete demonstration of the continuing ripple flowing out of the 1960s...
...Within the next eight years she completed her six great novels, of which Pride and Prejudice and Emma are the best known...
...Contributor Bernice Reagon, whose career stretches from the early sit-in movement and the Freedom Singers to her current involvement with the feminist vocal group, Sweet Honey in the Rock, points out, "You cannot present an accurate picture of the movements of the 1960s and 1970s unless you show them resting on the foundation of the civil rights movement----" Her interview is particularly good on the early civil rights movement, especially in Albany, Georgia...
...Because he fails to take real cognizance of people's resistance to the culture of narcissism, only hinting at the possibility in the preface and a few asides, Lasch tends to present a one-dimensional view of American society which invites comparison with the earlier analysis of Herbert Marcuse...
...Throughout the novel her shadow haunts Dubin as he tries to sort out his affections for the women in his life...
...In her thirties she settled with her widowed mother and sister in Hampshire and dedicated herself to writing...
...Such history of the 1960s as is easily available is often hostile to the New Left, to black power, and to campus protesters, if it treats them seriously at all...
...During what proves to be the several winters of his discontent, Dubin moves psychologically from Henry D. Thoreau, the subject of a completed biography, to D.H...
...She plunges into her own crisis, seeks psychiatric aid, stumbles into half-hearted sexual dalliances of her own, and agonizes over their two grown and alienated children...
...Her candor, good humor, and sense of commitment to both friends and career make this an entertaining, even moving memoir...
...Dubin's Lives opens out to address the limits of love and marriage, of familiarity and discovery, of self-fulfillment and responsibility, as well as those of biography and fiction themselves, by articulating the inconsistencies and emotional contradictions of real people...
...She began writing to entertain her family, and she loved social life and children...
...ToddGitlin (Todd Gitlin teaches sociology at the University of California, Berkeley...
...The bureaucratization of society and the proliferation of therapeutic "experts," Lasch argues, encourage narcissistic dependence by undermining people's sense of competence and moral responsibility...
...Roszak carries his argument about the ethos of self-discovery to absurd lengths...
...it is edited by John Case, managing editor of Working Papers, and Rosemary C.R...
...For the class of 1983, the turbulent events of the 1960s are as distant and dim as the Presidential campaign of Henry Wallace in 1948 was to campus rebels of the class of 1968...
Vol. 43 • June 1979 • No. 6
