Books Briefly
Books Briefly Radiation and chemical victims GI Guinea Pigs, by Michael Uhl and Tod Ensign (Playboy Press. 256 pp. $9.95). "You are invited to participate in, experience, and evaluate the blast of...
...Lane, however, paints a striking portrait of the valiant woman who wrote these stories...
...Yet she hungers for new excitement, and for the first time is unable to seek it out...
...277 pp...
...Social scientists played a part in this deception...
...Like hundreds of thousands of other GIs "invited" to such tests, the soldiers had little understanding of the radiation dangers to which they were exposed and which are now taking a heavy toll in cancer and other ailments...
...208 pp...
...Individuals have the power to break out of traditional roles and to turn their dreams of Utopia into reality...
...Harry Boyte believes they may...
...This somber novel masterfully evokes the poverty and moral righteousness of Nineteenth Century New England...
...Emmeline is thirteen when she leaves home for a Massachusetts cotton mill to earn money for her family...
...This is the story of a New Woman's midlife crisis...
...George Washington University's Human Resources Research Office conducted research focusing primarily on GI psychological reactions, with the aim of helping soldiers develop a "reasonable attitude" toward atomic weapons...
...Emmeline is really an old-fashioned morality tale that demonstrates in two different ways how emotional and physical closeness can ultimately result in far more lasting loneliness and social ostracism...
...In the second half of GI Guinea Pigs, Uhl and Ensign report deceptions in the defoliation programs in Vietnam...
...While the book is not a statistically systematic examination of radiation or of the effects of Agent Orange, it is an excellent study of complicity in the Army's programs...
...such are the convictions the early feminist writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman conveys through her short stories and essays collected here...
...As editor Ann J. Lane warns in the introduction, most of the stories will not rank as literature...
...Grass-roots action The Backyard Revolution: Understanding the New Citizen Movement, by Harry C. Boyte (Temple University Press...
...Boyte believes that the Left's failure to unify these specific struggles for popular control stems partly from the Left's own disregard for traditional, local institutions such as family, church, ethnic neighborhood ties...
...His "new citizen movement" includes a variety of forms of grass-roots political activity from neighborhood organization and local worker-control struggles to Na-derite public interest groups, multi-issue groups like ACORN or Massachusetts Fair Share, or growing ferment among specific constituencies (the elderly, women, farmers...
...Kate, the liberated heroine, is a successful newspaper columnist, has raised two independent children, managed a friendly divorce, and survived a love affair with her friend's husband without sacrificing her friendship with the two...
...Uhl and Ensign, who have written extensively on related material in The Progressive, make clear that it was central to the Army's purposes to downplay the bomb's real dangers to accustom GIs to the idea of fighting on an atomic battlefield...
...From this point on, the plot becomes unrealistic and predictable: The girl becomes pregnant, gives up her child for adoption, grows into an embittered spinster, and then, when she finally falls in love again, unknowingly marries her son...
...Gilman (1860-1896) insists that women deserve the dignity of being paid for their services as home-makers and suggests ways they can create a powerful and vital role for themselves in an improved economic order...
...yv'y...
...Boyte sees in these forms the emergence of a "democratic culture" which could root socialist politics in the daily experiences, practical democratic struggles, and traditional institutions of millions of citizens...
...Old-fashioned morality tale Emmeline, by Judith Rossner (Simon and Schuster...
...10.95...
...An early feminist's vision The Charlotte Perkins Gilman Reader, edited by Ann J. Lane (Pantheon Books...
...Do the many forms of citizen action which mushroomed in the 1970s constitute the basis for a more comprehensive political movement in the 1980s...
...12.95...
...Midlife crisis The Middle Ground, by Margaret Drabble (Alfred A. Knopf...
...While many on the Left will question Boyte's faith in the populist movements he discusses, they will have to deal with his analysis of the Left's own marginality...
...Strong and inspired as her suggestions are, they are weakened by her shallow characters, banal dialogue, and flat plots...
...His analysis of the potential support those ties can lend to a new insurgent force in American politics should provoke debate among activists on the Left...
...14.95...
...Lonely and naive, she lets her supervisor make love to her...
...271 pp...
...You are invited to participate in, experience, and evaluate the blast of an atomic bomb...
...With those words, loudspeakers welcomed GIs to an atomic bomb test at Camp Desert Rock, Nevada, in 1955...
...Finally, after scrutinizing with her journalistic eye the messy lives of her friends, Kate identifies and gains confidence in the unique equilibrium that served her so well in the past...
...The book is, above all, a testimony to Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who had the courage to break out of society's stifling roles and to share her dreams of an egalitarian world with an unappreciative, often hostile audience...
...10.95...
...331 pp...
...Drabble's undisciplined narrative sometimes obscures her points, but her writing is often colorful, and her feminist optimism is the unifying thread...
Vol. 45 • January 1981 • No. 1
