Books Briefly
Books Briefly Today's Middletown HOMETOWN by Peter Davis Simon and Schuster. 331 pp. $14.95. Peter Davis calls his book "a kind of guidebook" to Hamilton, a city of 64,000 in southwestern Ohio,...
...The publication of former CIA officer John Stockwell's first book, In Search of Enemies, an account of CIA complicity in the Angolan war, produced such a furor in the U.S...
...Davis insists that the events he chronicles are real...
...Authorial Antics THE OXFORD BOOK OF AMERICAN LITERARY ANECDOTES edited by Donald Hall Oxford University Press...
...When someone warned Robert Benchley that drinking was "slow poison," Benchley's response was, "So who's in a hurry...
...From letters, memoirs, diaries, and table talk...
...Marge Piercy's seventh novel draws on her working-class youth in Detroit during the 1950s...
...15.50...
...Lewis on Edith Wharton, for example, and Leon Edel on Henry James...
...15.95...
...At the encouragement of his publisher, he turned to fiction, and his first novel is Red Sunset, a competent and occasionally telling thriller set in mineral-rich, socially complex, east central Africa...
...Most prominent in the novel are accounts of illegal abortions, so horrifying in detail that they make a powerful political statement without a proselytizing word...
...Much of the material is narrative, some taken from literary biographies (R.W.B...
...Poet Donald Hall has prepared a nutritious casserole of American literary anecdotes about writers who range in time from Anne Bradstreet (born in 1612) to Jack Kerouac (born in 1922...
...An exclusively fictional approach or an exclusively sociological survey might have been more successful...
...In his narration of occurrences that divided or united the townspeople during six years of Hamilton's recent history, there are segments that remind one of Peyton Place...
...Peter Davis calls his book "a kind of guidebook" to Hamilton, a city of 64,000 in southwestern Ohio, chosen as a subject because it is big enough to have the things its people need and yet small enough for an observer to see what is going on...
...13.50...
...Davis undertakes to combine the sociological methods of Robert and Helen Lynd's Middletown with the fictional devices of a Winesburg, Ohio or Our Town...
...International Chess Match RED SUNSET by John Stockwell William Morrow...
...Hall extracts amusing antics as well as poignant, revealing episodes in the lives of almost 150 American authors, none now living...
...A bitter labor dispute, an exciting basketball game, a murderous shooting and a subsequent court trial, and some steamy extramarital shenanigans are presented grip-pingly...
...A good bedside book, usefully indexed for both topics and names...
...intelligence community that not only was Stockwell harassed, his book was hauled into court...
...360 pp...
...443 pp...
...The flash-forwards are only a small part of the book, but they are original and provide the most interest...
...360 pp...
...Editor Hall, recalling Samuel Johnson's definition of an anecdote as a "minute passage of private life," has collected curious items of information and memorable witticisms...
...Yet Davis's attempts to unite social research and story-telling techniques don't always work...
...A 1980 Supreme Court settlement in effect deprived Stockwell of all future earnings from his book and forced him to submit drafts of future work to the CIA for clearance...
...The plot encompasses the personal and business rivalries of international business men and women whose symbolic point of confrontation becomes a master-level chess match between an American woman and an expatriate South African banker...
...The novel may help Stockwell make a career in fiction, so long as his subject, as in Red Sunset, is CIA-less enough to avoid company censorship...
...Otherwise, the book's politics are subtle: Piercy lets her descriptions of life before feminism speak for themselves...
...The familiar story of bohemianism up against social convention is made new through flash-forwards to the 1970s that show how the characters' earlier radicalizing experiences became the philosophical foundations of their adult lives...
...Life before Feminism BRAIDED LIVES by Marge Piercy Summit Books...
Vol. 46 • July 1982 • No. 7
