BOOKS BRIEFLY
Books Briefly Odd Couple MONSIGNOR QUIXOTE by Graham Greene Simon & Schuster. 221 pp. $12.95. Like Hemingway, whose search for a code of secular honor led to the simplicity of ritual (The Old...
...Furthermore, she contends that courts take the role of choosing ritualistic scapegoats...
...Louis and St...
...Wilkins does provide inside information on many civil rights campaigns, especially those concerning school desegregation...
...15.95...
...352 pp...
...Dutton...
...6.95 paperback...
...The bulk of the book, detailing Wilkins's post-1931 activities as NAACP assistant secretary, as editor of Crisis, and, after 1954, as NAACP executive secretary, is more leaden and self-justifying...
...Box 31463, San Francisco, CA 94131...
...139 pp...
...But Sidney Lens, The Progressive's senior editor, has written more than a summary of the past...
...If the motive here was to create a new American hard-boiled loner, a kind of Philip Marlowe by way of a Bostonish law practice, the plan has failed...
...11.50...
...Of further note are Wilkins's sharp perceptions on the role of party politics in limiting the commitment to civil rights by U.S...
...The ideas of Malcolm X, W.E.B...
...is so limited, so predictable in its subject, that it is finally transparent, and what really shows up is that old, old image of exploitation...
...179 pp...
...Ziskin believes that we lock others up to calm our fears of what we ourselves might do...
...Amply illustrated and equipped with a chronology, index, and excellent list of further readings, The Bomb is a handy guidebook for anyone who has just become concerned about the arms race and intends to participate in the struggle for peace...
...Civil Rights Leader STANDING FAST: THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OFROYWILKINS by Roy Wilkins with Tom Mathews The Viking Press...
...While it is possible to sympathize at the death of Shea's daughter and his subsequent attempts to make meaning of his botched life and career, it is impossible to extend to Shea any emotion, even humor, at what amounts to 352 pages of stylized whimpering, much of it laced with references to black characters who are cast exclusively as pimps, whores, baby killers, perverts, or thieves...
...This angers the local bishop, and Monsignor Quixote decides to take a vacation accompanied by the village mayor, recently defeated in an election...
...12.95 hardcover...
...Like Hemingway, whose search for a code of secular honor led to the simplicity of ritual (The Old Man and the Sea), Graham Greene in Monsignor Quixote turns to the components of myth and legend in yet another attempt to explain the ways of God to manf Athough his recasting of the great Cervantes novel with Don Quixote as a priest and Sancho as a small-town Communist mayor is fraught with the peril of inadvertent burlesque, the danger is negotiated, and Greene delivers a modern-day parable of religion and philosophy which sneaks up on the skeptical reader by degrees of plain-spoken honesty mixed with fanciful narrative...
...Countdown THEBOMB by Sidney Lens Lodestar Books/E.P...
...Little in this staid but important autobiography will change the image or counter that self-perception...
...Roy Wilkins, a leading light of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People for half a century, understood that he had a "reputation for being a quiet, rather boring fellow...
...On a wine-filled journey in an old car, the two create a dialectic of Catholicism and communism, each scoring well-placed points on the other and forming a deep friendship...
...On Trial THE BLIND EAGLE: STORIES FROM THE COURTROOM by Harriet Ziskin Early Stages Press (P.O...
...apparently this is considered a "realistic" treatment...
...Unexceptional and usually unobtrusive, her theme has less impact than her bitter tales of mangled, wasted lives...
...This book, intended for young readers but useful as a primer for all ages, is an outline history of the nuclear age—from the discovery of radioactivity by Antoine Henri Becquerel in 1897 to the nuclear freeze campaigns of 1982...
...By John Gregory Dunne Linden Press/Simon & Schuster...
...By the end of the journey, the two men seem to have absorbed each other's beliefs and, more importantly for Greene, each other's doubts...
...In these true stories from the Alameda County Courthouse in Oakland, California, almost all the men on trial are black...
...Paul and his crusading newspaper career in Kansas City evocatively recreate black middle-class life in the early Twentieth Century...
...Sections describing his youth in St...
...Presidents and Presidential aspirants...
...That's fear, girl, caging all the black men up," one man's sister tells Harriet Ziskin, a journalist and fiction writer...
...From its burlesque terseness of style to its impoverished characterizations, Dunne's new novel seems to be, at best, an intermediate step toward a screenplay...
...Far less acuity marks the treatment of black critics of NAACP strategy...
...Shea is no paperback paradigm...
...he is a self-absorbed, middle-aged loser...
...The Bomb is an impassioned plea for action to avert what Lens properly calls "catastrophe beyond conception...
...DuBois, Robert Williams, Stokeley Carmichael, Bob Moses, and Paul Robeson are so consistently caricatured that one wonders whether Wilkins ever seriously considered their positions...
...361 pp...
...Whimpering Loser DUTCH SHEA JR...
...Greene's tale is set in rural Spain, where a village priest, Father Quixote, who claims to be a descendant of the Cervantes hero, is promoted by a fluke to the rank of monsignor...
...16.95...
...Hard on the success of True Confessions, novelist John Gregory Dunne serves up another look at his mongrel world of urban Irish Catholic sordidness, but the view in Dutch Shea Jr...
...Oddly, the most interesting passages are those treating the years when Wilkins was least a public figure...
...It is also well to be reminded of the dedication and physical courage of Wilkins, a leader identified by the 1960s with the conservative wing of the freedom movement...
Vol. 47 • January 1983 • No. 1
