Books Briefly
Books Briefly The Edges of Power A MAN'S LIFE: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY by Roger Wilkins Simon and Schuster. 384 pp. $17.95. Roger Wilkins has written a bittersweet autobiography from the edges of power...
...Roger Wilkins has written a bittersweet autobiography from the edges of power and from the fringes of the black community...
...Wilkins makes no claims to being uncompromised or unscarred and acknowledges that his actions have stemmed from weakness and strength, from careerism and selflessness, from a sense of belonging to America's elite and the fear of belonging nowhere...
...Through her we see the hopelessness of women's lives under Catholic patriarchy and realize anew how severely women suffer at the hands of male warmakers...
...9.95...
...Yet even in those difficult times, women created their own organizations, which, though sometimes strangled by infighting and decimated by splintering, promoted peace, birth control, suffrage, unionism, and the philosophical foundations of modern feminist theory...
...Through it all, he maintained a vision of America's problems as essentially personal ones...
...Until recent years, as conventional wisdom has it, most men thought the best position for women on the Left was prone...
...Legacy of Violence THE PRISONER'S WIFE by Jack Holland Dodd Mead...
...whites turned on each other...
...12.95...
...Paton occasionally strains too hard for tragedy and plucks too hard at the heartstrings...
...Except for its rather superficial discussions of sexuality and masculinity, A Man's Life is refreshingly frank in its self-reflection...
...21.95...
...We are made to see also how women can become brutalized, to the point that they enthusiastically attack those labeled "betrayers" by their men...
...Children turned from their parents...
...Neither women's ideas on socialism nor their concerns about their own rights were worth considering...
...Though Holland omits some necessary historical background, he shows that violence, after decades of guerrilla warfare, has left even the radical leaders without direction...
...177 pp...
...His reminiscences of his uncle, NAACP head Roy Wilkins, and of McGeorge Bundy are especially acute...
...At times such a stance blunts Wilkins's analytical powers...
...192 pp...
...He describes a youth spent in New York City and in the largely white environs of Grand Rapids, emphasizing both the psychic costs of America's crazy quilt apartheid and the sustenance drawn from an achievement-oriented family where "knowledge was capital...
...Echo of Apartheid AH, BUT YOUR LAND IS BEAUTIFUL by Alan Paton Charles Scribner's Sons...
...In the early 1970s Wilkins joined The Washington Post as an editorial writer and won a Pulitzer Prize for his Watergate contributions...
...Jack Holland tells the story of Nora Costello, a naive young woman whose IRA husband is serving a life sentence...
...As if to reflect this shattered society, Paton tells his story in several voices—among them, the flat whine of a bureaucrat, the crude sexual slurs of a mad "Christian white woman," the usually unobtrusive voice of a narrator who sometimes steps forward and becomes a Greek chorus, underscoring the sadness and pain of the action...
...As the Afrikaner Nationalists drove in the wedge of apartheid, dividing whites from blacks, coloreds, and Indians, and as South Africans of all races fought back, there were unintended results...
...The memorable portrait of Northern Ireland in this somber novel is one to keep in mind when war, anywhere, begins to seem okay...
...She divides her focus between the personalities, where her book comes alive, and the issues, which could have been enriched by more anecdotes...
...After completing law school at the University of Michigan, Wilkins became, as he puts it, "the top black" in the Agency for International Development, the Community Relations Service, the Justice Department, and the Ford Foundation at various times during the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon years...
...More for reference than bedtime reading, the book is nonetheless a valuable contribution to women's history...
...Yet this fascination with things personal, and with the choices open to the powerful, makes Wilkins a keen observer...
...At The Post and later at The New York Times, as throughout his career, Wilkins confronted and fought racism...
...344 pp...
...Buhle, a historian at Brown University, presents a careful, though turgid, overview...
...But, mostly, the notes that he sounds are true and clear, and echo uncomfortably close to home...
...Women on the Left WOMEN AND AMERICAN SOCIALISM 1870-1920 by Mari Jo Buhle University of Illinois Press...
...In his first novel in twenty-eight years, Alan Paton, author of Cry, the Beloved Country, has told a fearsome parable of life in a police state: South Africa, in the 1950s...
...The terrorists keep bombing, and the women keep having babies, but no one any longer believes that life in the Six Counties there will ever really change...
Vol. 46 • August 1982 • No. 8
