Books Briefly
Books Briefly Self-ruin THE SPORTY GAME by John Newhouse Alfred A. Knopf. 242 pp. $14.95. In 1965, after Boeing lost the contract for the C-5A, the Pentagon's new leviathan, it decided to...
...14.95 hardcover...
...The whole country cracks and rumbles and cries out in its terrible leanness, stripped with exploitations and terror...
...In the 1930s, she filed reports from breadlines and strike kitchens...
...291 pp...
...So was born the 747, an airplane that almost bankrupted Boeing and ushered in a decade of wasteful competition among American aircraft manufacturers...
...7.95 paperback...
...This good collection of reporting and fiction (a few poems too) is a welcome harbinger of that work and a moving re-introduction to a writer who has been out of sight for too long...
...Yet the analysis unintentionally poses some tough questions for contemporary capitalism as an industry acts in direct contradiction to market needs and brings hard times on itself and the traveling public, not by mistake but by design...
...In 1965, after Boeing lost the contract for the C-5A, the Pentagon's new leviathan, it decided to recoup by building a commercial version in consultation with Pan Am...
...At eighty-two, Le Sueur is writing a series of short novels that promise to be better than anything she has done...
...In a life that began with the century, Meridel Le Sueur has caught the voices of Americans who are tired and hurt and hungry— from soldiers bound for Korea, fearing death, to women who have lost their men to the mines...
...All rushed to flood the market with airliners too big to be operated profitably on most flights, leaving it to the European Consortium Airbus Industrie to build the airplane best suited to current air traffic needs...
...In a voice almost too Whitmanesque for our unimpassioned times, she laid the pain of that troubled decade at the feet of an economic system in which cows had more value than human beings...
...Harbinger RIPENING: SELECTED WORK, 1927-1980 by Meridel Le Sueur Feminist Press...
...Reading Newhouse's fascinating account of the wheeling and dealing of this world, it is easy to be caught up in its ethos...
...John Newhouse follows this story through the labyrinth of relations among airframe manufacturers, engine makers, airlines, banks, and even governments, unraveling the mysteries of one of the few industries where the values of undiluted macho capitalism still prevail, where a company will often literally bet itself and risk its profits just to appear "sporty" enough to be considered a competitor...
Vol. 46 • November 1982 • No. 11
