Books Briefly
Books BrieflyIf% Over There THE ATOM BESIEGED: ANTTNUCLEAR MOVEMENTS IN FRANCE AND GERMANY by Dorothy Nelkin and Michael Pollak MIT Press. 235 pp. $7.95 paperback. "Nuclear power symbolizes the...
...Political journalist Richard Reeves conceived the admirable idea of retracing the route of Alexis de Tocqueville's historic American travels...
...In a rather abstract, academic volume, they illustrate this claim in their examination of the nuclear protest movements in France and Germany...
...Reeves's absorbing book would be praiseworthy if it did no more than induce its readers to re-examine Tocqueville's marvelous study, but it achieves much more than that...
...He narrates his experiences in a knowledgeable but unpretentious way...
...He was indeed often at the right place at the right time: at Dallas on November 22, 1963...
...6.95 paperback...
...Unfortunately Nelkin and Pollak do not draw parallels between the European and the American antinuclear movements, nor do they pay more than passing attention to the recent international movement for nuclear disarmament...
...many critics consider it the best book on the subject written by anyone...
...Equipped with an inquiring mind, high intellectual voltage, and a readiness to generalize, Tocqueville wrote what is still regarded as the best book on the United States written by a foreign observer...
...13.95...
...Abbey sounds tired in these essays collected from magazines and desk drawers...
...399 pp...
...He sounds like a man who has told the same story too many times...
...Parched Naturalist DOWN THE RIVER by Edward Abbey E.P...
...Abbey himself, as he confesses in his introduction, was prompted by the lure of easy money to write some of these essays...
...in London in 1957 during the Suez crisis, and in Havana at the time of the missile crisis...
...Good Timing THE RIGHT PLACE AT THE RIGHT TIME by Robert MacNeil Little, Brown...
...MacNeil, who describes himself as "an instinctive liberal," relishes his work and conveys his enjoyment in his book of "stories I tell if people ask me...
...Reeves's enlightening book is a mix of shrewd observations that sometimes depress, sometimes elate...
...He does have some good moments, as when he contemplates folly and dust in the ghost town of Bodie, California, where "the sweet smell of quick easy wealth" drew 12,000 human beings to live—and, for many of them, to die—in the desert...
...Perhaps that accounts for the parched note in his voice...
...Tocqueville was disturbed by what he called "the tyranny of the majority...
...He deplores the banality, triviality, and "professional amorality" of much television news reporting and ruefully acknowledges his own infrequent participations...
...The antinuclear movement has been far more successful in Germany than in France because, despite the massive scale of protest in both countries, Germany offers more points of access to the political process than does France...
...Nuclear power symbolizes the major problems of advanced industrial society," sociologists Dorothy Nelkin and Michael Pollak announce at the outset of their study...
...Alas, the familiar voice in the wilderness isn't quite what it was when it cried out in Desert Solitaire...
...He was wrong at times, of course, but much more often he was right...
...Democracy in Footprints AMERICAN JOURNEY by Richard Reeves Simon and Schuster...
...The most important result of his nine-month journey from Newport, Rhode Island, where he landed, westward to Green Bay, Wisconsin, south to New Orleans, and back to Washington and New York, was his classic work, Democracy in America...
...242 pp...
...Although their sympathies clearly lie with the protesters, they also carefully define the ideology of the "nucleocrats," those who most staunchly defend nuclear power...
...Robert MacNeil is the Canadian-born television journalist who in 1975 created the respected "MacNeil-Lehrer Report," a nightly half-hour examination of aspects of current news for the Public Broadcasting System...
...Reeves, too, is concerned by the prospect...
...Edward Abbey is back, singing the joys of rivers dammed and undammed, cursing the technocrats who would grind mountains down into powder and turn forests into pulpwood plantations...
...Dutton...
...On his own journey, begun in 1979, Reeves tried to interview persons whose roles in society were similar to those interviewed by Tocqueville 150 years ago...
...In 1831 Tocqueville, a young French artistocrat and magistrate, came to the United States to study our penitentiaries...
...13.95 hardcover...
...333 pp...
...Now fifty-one, he has had a long, interesting career in printed, radio, and television news (Reuters, BBC, NBC, and PBS...
...15.95...
...Much of what Reeves heard confirmed Tocqueville's astonishing prescience...
Vol. 46 • September 1982 • No. 9
