Books Briefly
Powledge, Fred
Books Briefly Food and Consumers FAT OF THE LAND by Fred Powledge Simon and Schuster. 287 pp. $15.95. Fred Powledge, a widely experienced journalist, examines the increasingly complex processes...
...An Eye-Opener REBELS AGAINST WAR: THE AMERICAN PEACE MOVEMENT 1933-1983 by Lawrence S. Wittner Temple University Press...
...But the consumer can help himself to some degree, Powledge contends, through consumer groups, informed buying, trading at farmers' markets, and a variety of other means...
...34.95 hardcover...
...Muste through World War II to postwar "nuclear pacifism" and, finally, to the Vietnam war and the present...
...Wittner traces the links from such radical pacifists as Jane Addams, Roger Baldwin, and A.J...
...13.95...
...364 pp...
...Fred Powledge, a widely experienced journalist, examines the increasingly complex processes involved in the production of our food—its harvest, alteration, packaging, advertising, transportation, and sale...
...There Alexander's musical career was shaped by the ambitions of his immigrant grandfather, now wealthy from scrap metal, and his parents, former communists...
...when she is hit by a taxi and dies, Sennett writes a long flashback of Alexander's childhood in Chicago (where Sennett grew up...
...Unfortunately the 1960s and 1970s get short shrift and lack the detailed analysis of the original segment of the book...
...In providing this detailed, and at times absorbing, account of the food industry, Powledge tells us more than many food buyers may want to know...
...Readers who are musicians may appreciate this novel more than others, but even they may find the lengthy technical descriptions rather strained...
...Pacifism, as Wittner thoroughly documents, has "provided the United States with some of its most irrepressible agitators...
...The "genteel passive stereotype of pacifists," Wittner writes, is belied by the symbiotic relationship of reform and peace movements...
...9.95 paperback...
...No one, least of all the consumer," he writes, "can ever hope to control them, particularly at a time when the national Government is unwilling to help...
...Back to New York and the present, Alexander assuages his guilt and grief about Susan by throwing himself into rehearsals of the Brahms "German Requiem...
...The outlook is better for those who organize their purchasing power and refuse as a group to buy shoddy, overpriced products...
...It makes the connection we all vaguely know has existed between social reforms and peace movements through much of this century...
...Anyone can profit from reading Fat of the Land...
...Her skills as a pianist never match his as a cellist...
...Prospects are not good for those who seek nutritious, tasty, less adulterated food at cheaper prices...
...Sennett's youthful pianist/cellist, Alexander Hoffmann, seeks to understand his brief marriage to Susan, whom he met when he went to New York to study music...
...222 pp...
...Nevertheless, it is probably the best such study available...
...This update of Winner's 1969 history of the peace movement from 1941 to 1960 may be an eye-opener even for peace activists...
...Primarily for Musicians AN EVENING OF BRAHMS by Richard Sennett Alfred A. Knopf...
...While it includes tantalizing tidbits about the personal lives of Brahms and the Schumanns and about the radical involvements of Alexander's parents, there is something self-conscious and calculated about sociologist Sennett's second novel...
Vol. 48 • October 1984 • No. 12
