BOOKS BRIEFLY
Books Briefly Social Oddities A DICTIONARY OF AMERICAN SOCIAL CHANGE edited by Louis Filler Robert E. Krieger Publishing Co. (Malabar, Florida). 256 pp. $18.50. This updated revision of A...
...6.95 paperback...
...Could it be that this woman, so at home in the air, was most absorbed in the banalities of meticulous accounting and recounting, of keeping her feet on the ground...
...253 pp...
...An example is the entry on "muckrakers," a subject on which Filler is an authority...
...13.95 hardcover...
...they are urbane, skeptical, and funny in ways that are sometimes serious...
...And there are a number of shorties like, "Happiness is when the television tube blows out right at the start of the 'Miss American Pageant.' " Book of Gems THE HEART OF A WOMAN by Maya Angelou Random House...
...Agrarian Radical A POPULIST ASSAULT: SARAH E.V...
...EMERY ON AMERICAN DEMOCRACY 1862-1895 by Pauline Adams and Emma S. Thornton Bowling Green State University Popular Press...
...291 pp...
...Finally, she describes blacks of various nationalities in Cairo...
...The authors of this interesting study have rescued Emery from oblivion and placed her where she belongs, with Ignatius Donnelly, Jacob Coxey, Mary Ellen Lease, and other red bandanna radicals who peppered the Midwestern political pot...
...This updated revision of A Dictionary of American Social Change is a useful compilation of people, programs, concepts, dates, slogans, books, songs, colloquialisms, and technical terms...
...Hamlin Garland, who shared some of her views and at times appeared with her on the lecture platform, described Emery as "an attractive woman with a daring boyish bob...
...Baker's "Observer" columns in The New York Times, the origin of numerous pieces in the Almanac, are invariably readable and amusing...
...14.95...
...She portrays some leading lights from the black intelligensia, those with significant and often unheralded talent, too often accompanied by an obsession with whites and their cultural domination...
...146 pp...
...among them—are the diamonds in a book of gems...
...Senators...
...The book includes a hilarious parody of Pat O'Brien's Knute Rockne "Gipper" speech...
...This vagueness, while at times irritating, is the means Ward Just chooses to demonstrate the vacuum in which policymakers live and work...
...Washington Politics IN THE CITY OF FEAR by Ward Just The Viking Press...
...Those readers described by Leslie Stephen as being "sensible of the pleasure of turning over a collection, lying like trout in a stream, and snapping up, with the charm of unexpectedness, morsels of oddity and pathos that drift past" will find a feast in these pages...
...Humor, Updated POOR RUSSELL'S ALMANAC by Russell Baker Congdon & Lattes...
...252 pp...
...Incidents which are catalysts for its plot are not fully described, episodes are strikingly similar regardless of period, and the various Presidents are never named...
...her diction has vivacity but reveals no strong emotion...
...This novel of Washington politics skitters back and forth over the last twenty years...
...Sarah Emery (1838-1895) was a Populist writer, lecturer, and agitator for monetary reform who for thirty years energetically attacked the prevailing economic order...
...272 pp...
...Perhaps Backus is correct in arguing that Earhart's apparent coolness was a necessary defense against the unrelenting publicity that followed her...
...Amelia Earhart's Letters LETTERS FROM AMELIA by Jean L. Backus Beacon Press...
...Her agrarian radicalism was a grass-roots phenomenon uninfluenced by Marxist or Utopian theories...
...12.50...
...His Almanac, a refurbished and updated version of the 1972 original, may remind some readers of Cuppy's How to Get From January to December (1951...
...And for those who cannot remember exactly what the Wilmot Proviso provided, or who the Locofocos were, this is a valuable sourcebook...
...Russell Baker is a widely read newspaper humorist in a field that no longer abounds with the likes of Don Marquis, Will Cuppy, Damon Runyon, Will Rogers, Ring Lardner, and George Ade...
...14.95...
...Earhart was not a talented writer...
...In less than a decade she moved from singing and acting to work as an administrator of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and marriage to an African freedom fighter...
...Her profiles of the famous—Billie Holiday and Martin Luther King Jr...
...This fourth installment of her autobiography captures Maya Angelou's flowering as a political activist and feminist...
...The Populists, Grangers, Greenbackers, and Farmers' Alliance, with whom she was often identified, favored, among other measures, the free coinage of silver, strict regulation of railroad rates, a graduated income tax, and the popular election of U.S...
...She eloquently describes how her son's rapid development, emotional and political, frightened her as much as it thrilled her...
...Topics range from "abolitionism" to the "Zoar Society...
...Amelia Earhart was a woman pioneer, in public life as well as in aviation...
...they speak of surface things—money, domestic details, the grueling routine of interminable lecture circuits...
...A persuasive speaker, Emery lectured widely throughout the Midwest...
...Filler has a gift for compression, and many of his paragraphs are models of concision and clarity...
...Through telling exchanges (authentic, no doubt, since Just was a Washington reporter) we see his characters—from powerful Senators to petty appointees and career military officers—function frequently with neither knowledge nor justification, and always without regard for the American people who allow them their power...
...She wrote Seven Financial Conspiracies, a stinging indictment of the "heartless money power" she believed was ruining American farmers and workers...
...A professional celebrity, she flew airplanes and broke records, but she spent more time talking and writing about flying and being promoted by her publisher and husband, George Palmer Putnam...
...Whether life in the limelight was itself the stuff of Earhart's dreams or whether she endured public exposure to support her flying is an open question that arises as one reads Jean Backus's attempt to bring out the woman behind the legend from letters Earhart wrote to her mother and sister...
...The letters here do not reveal an inner woman...
Vol. 47 • February 1983 • No. 2
