Books Briefly
Books Briefly Literate Columnist PIECES OF EIGHT by Sidney J. Harris Houghton Mifflin. 292 pp. $12.95. For years, Sidney Harris has turned out, five days a week, one of the country's most...
...They cover the field of practical experience from shopkeeping prudence to the highest rules of conduct...
...Some of the letters are heartbreaking with their revelations of deprivation, illness, and old age...
...Harris examines the weaknesses and follies of human nature as well as man's strength and nobility...
...For years, Sidney Harris has turned out, five days a week, one of the country's most literate newspaper columns...
...The editor of this interesting and informative book has selected some 200 letters from the thousands written to Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, Harry Hopkins, and Federal officials during the Great Depression by anguished Americans who sought help, offered advice, and exhibited fortitude...
...This is superior reporting, casual, concise, and compressed...
...Voices from the Great Depression DOWN & OUT IN THE GREAT DEPRESSION: LETTERS FROM THE'FORGOTTEN MAN' edited by Robert S. McElvaine University of North Carolina Press...
...The spelling, syntax, and grammar are preserved as written...
...Some of the best of his recent pieces, which usually consist of eight paragraphs, are assembled in this new collection under such rubrics as "Of the Social Animal" and "Of the Mind and Passions...
...Lillian Ross, a veteran writer for The New Yorker, is best known for her famous profile of Ernest Hemingway and a long account of John Huston's filming of Stephen Crane's Red Badge of Courage...
...Three themes dominate the book: that a female, as well as a male, God exists in the universe...
...They discuss our knowledge of ourselves and others, of the human heart, of love and hate and envy and aspiration...
...8.95 paperback...
...This thick volume of fifty essays goes a long way toward explaining the spiritual values at the heart of the women's movement...
...that there was a time in history when the spiritual force of the feminine was not denigrated as it is now, and that the health—even the survival—of the human race depends upon the reinstatement of that force...
...Families on relief in New York City were given an average of $2.39 each week...
...Superior Reporting TAKES by Lillian Ross Congdon & Weed...
...She writes at some length of Adlai Stevenson and Ralph Bunche and includes shorter observations and vignettes ranging in subject matter from George Balanchine to a pianist at the Waldorf-Astoria cocktail bar to Don Ameche at a centennial celebration of the Bell Telephone System...
...some provoke a smile, and all are enormously affective...
...Soul Mothers THE POLITICS OF WOMEN'S SPIRITUALITY edited by Charlene Spretnak Anchor Books...
...The impact of the book is enhanced with some excellent photographs...
...A superb bedside book...
...The book contains essays by well-known feminist theorists, including Adrienne Rich, Gloria Steinem, Mary Daly, and Robin Morgan...
...The very act of writing," editor McElvaine observes, "showed that a person was not completely without hope...
...251 pp...
...590 pp...
...278 pp...
...In Takes she has assembled three dozen contributions to the magazine's "Talk of the Town" over a span of some twenty years, 1960-1982...
...14.95...
...It also offers important and previously unpublished or narrowly circulated pieces by Barbara Starrett, Kay Turner, Judy Grahn, and Hallie Ingle-hart...
...By 1932 unemployment and destitution in the United States were unprecedented, and only 25 per cent of the people without jobs received any public welfare...
...23 hardcover...
...Habitual readers of Harris's columns will have read many of these coments before, but they will find they go down well the second time—a true test of excellence...
...He has a gift for aphoristic utterance, and many wise, witty observations are included here...
Vol. 47 • August 1983 • No. 8
