Books Briefly
Books Briefly The Wrong War THE MAGINOT LINE SYNDROME: AMERICA'S HOPELESS FOREIGN POLICY by Sidney Lens Ballinger/Harper & Row. 196 pp. $14.50. Like France, which looked to the Maginot Line to...
...What drove her...
...It makes for can't stop reading, but it reveals more about the time—that abstraction we call The Sixties—and the people who knew Edie than it does about Edie herself...
...396 pp...
...Then the economy slumped, and the industrial order unraveled...
...12.50 paperback...
...455 pp...
...Lens, The Progressive's senior editor, provides meticulous documentation to support his closely reasoned argument...
...The mountain people, bereft of the benefits of either the old order or the new, settled into "a deep and lasting depression...
...One friend recalls, "She was just psychologically scattered: She never finished a sentence, she never looked you in the face, she was never there...
...Edie is an ordered pastiche of photos and deftly spliced interviews...
...17.50...
...He deals effectively with critics on the Right, who charge that disarmament would "turn the world over to communism," and with critics on the Left, who believe that revolution must take precedence over work for peace...
...Wolfe Anthology THE PURPLE DECADES: A READER by Tom Wolfe Farrar, Straus, & Giroux...
...His style can become too parrot-like, but Wolfe carves up bourgeois-liberal-consumeroid pretensions like a surgeon...
...16.95...
...Like France, which looked to the Maginot Line to protect it from German invasion in World War II, the United States is "focusing on the wrong enemy and relying on weapons and strategies that were made for another kind of war," says Sidney Lens...
...At a time when Mother Jones attacks journalist Tom Wolfe for being right-wing, Dallas art critics assail him for being too patriotic (defending the veterans against the art establishment over the Vietnam memorial), and some newspaper hacks continue to sneer at his new journalism even as they steal from it, there is some value in reexamining Wolfe—again...
...The struggle against war," Lens insists in this valuable book, "is the world revolution...
...Land passed into the hands of absentee owners, including, eventually, the Federal Government...
...The region's agricultural fabric disintegrated...
...Ruin of a Region MINERS, MILLHANDS, AND MOUNTAINEERS by Ronald Eller University of Tennessee Press...
...From the "The Last American Hero" through his outrageous, inventive caricatures, celebrations, and as-sasinations of American society, encompassing surfers, celebrities, druggies, shrinks, astronauts, architects, and even artists, Wolfe can rightfully be credited with having breathed life into a nearly moribund journalism...
...Edie dancing her balletic twist in a toe-to-hip cast...
...The Purple Decades is a well-selected anthology of Wolfe's more influential pieces of reportage from the 1960s and 1970s...
...Image piles up on broken image: cigarette-thin Edie gorging salmon, oysters, caviar—then slipping off to vomit...
...After the Civil War, industrial America swept into the Appalachian mountains in search of resources...
...Fourth-of-July Sparkler EDIE: AN AMERICAN BIOGRAPHY by Jean Stein, edited with George Plimpton Alfred A. Knopf...
...In the decades that followed, timber companies ruined hillsides and streams...
...Appalachia became an American colony...
...Wonderfully entertaining, The Purple Decades is the right stuff for fans or innocents...
...And we have based our security on nuclear weapons and the strategy of containment, both of which have proven to be counterproductive...
...coal companies uprooted people and transplanted them to dreary camps...
...We have denned the enemy as 'Soviet communism,' when in fact the challenge has come from far-flung national and social revolution...
...272 pp...
...Edie in a dirty negligee, bringing a roommate a breakfast tray of eggs, juice, and drugs, and, near the end, Edie bounding in and out of psychiatric wards...
...The biography never really answers...
...23.50 hardcover...
...Edie Sedgwick lived the life of a Fourth-of-July sparkler: too brilliant, too hot, gone too fast...
...Who was she...
...She was born a WASP heiress, raised by a Bluebeard of a father and a ghost of a mother on a series of California ranches, studied art in Cambridge, became the queen bee of Andy Warhol's entourage in New York, and died of a barbiturate overdose at twenty-eight...
...friends and relatives describe Edie's short, stormy life with intelligence and clarity of detail...
...What astonishes the reader in Ronald Eller's clear, scholarly history of Appalachian industrialization, 1880-1930, is the speed at which a region can be transformed, a people debilitated...
Vol. 47 • April 1983 • No. 4
