Books Briefly
Books Briefly A Celebration of Trees A COUNTRYMAN'S WOODS by Hal Borland Photographs by Les Line Alfred A. Knopf. 184 pp. $25. Hal Borland, naturalist and writer, died in 1978 in his adopted...
...Patrick Brantlinger tries to debunk what he considers to be this myth of mass culture's poisonous effect...
...307 pp...
...As such it is like a walk through the woods with an old friend after a long separation...
...He had completed his short essays for A Countryman's Woods, a book planned with and now completed by his friend and neighbor, photographer Les Line of Audubon magazine...
...The plots, of course, are intertwined, and the unraveling exposes even deeper layers of human depravity...
...15.95...
...Examining Mass Culture BREAD AND CIRCUSES: THEORIES OF MASS CULTURE AS SOCIAL DECAY by Patrick Brantlinger Cornell University Press...
...Hal Borland, naturalist and writer, died in 1978 in his adopted homeland in the foothills of the Berkshires in northwestern Connecticut...
...And as a theory of social change, it is downright silly...
...Many radicals and conservatives alike adhere to the notion that the media—newspapers, radio, and especially television-drug and tyrannize people...
...The Business of Saving Souls ONE MORE SUNDAY by John D. MacDonald Alfred A. Knopf...
...He branches into a few shrubs ("The dogwood is a picture tree, winter or summer"), and his engaging digressions include his choice for a fireplace fire (hickory for the back log, oak for the front, cedar or birch for kindling, and, for fragrance, fruit wood...
...Line, originally from Michigan, contributes brief essays on the silver maple, black locust, and apple, and his photographs are superb...
...24.50...
...At center stage is the Eternal Church of the Believer, dominated by the John Tinker Meadows family: an aging, senile father and a son whose sexual appetite matches his sister's gluttony...
...As a description of reality, it is exceedingly thin—"to some hard-to-define extent, the structure of a mass medium like television clearly does shape history...
...So much for class struggle...
...311 pp...
...He is partial to sugar maples and calls the American beech "one of the most beautiful trees in the woodland...
...With shrewd promotion, tithing, and appeal to fear they have built a fundamentalist empire, complete with political power and profitable side operations in hospital equipment, burial caskets, real estate, and radio and television...
...With his novel Condominium and now with One More Sunday, mystery writer John D. MacDonald has broken outside the mold of the murder yarn but continues to expose greed, corruption, and social rot...
...As Borland emphasizes in his foreword, the book is an "insistently personal" one, full of personal reminiscences and intended as a celebration of trees, not as a handbook...
...Brantlinger claims that mass culture contains a "liberating potential" and "radiate(s) a Utopian promise...
...Examining the analyses of mass culture by such diverse thinkers as Sig-mund Freud, T.S...
...Borland covers some eighty species...
...His individual eye, and solid botanical knowledge, are all the keener for his recollections of growing up in the High Plains of eastern Colorado, where there were almost no trees...
...Though Brantlinger addresses a fascinating subject, he leaves the reader unsatisfied at the end...
...As a history of ideas, Bread and Circuses is mildly stimulating...
...Indeed, he goes so far as to maintain that democratizing the technology of the media represents the only hope of progressive historical change...
...As the dissolute characters pursue their personal power hungers and destruction, a decent man moves into the Southern community to trace the mysterious disappearance of his young wife...
...The creator of hero Travis McGee has written a scathing story about the big business of saving souls...
...Eliot, Albert Camus, and Herbert Marcuse, he detects a dewy-eyed nostalgia for bygone aristocratic culture and an unwarranted fatalism about the ability to overcome the totalitarian aspects of modern mass culture...
Vol. 48 • June 1984 • No. 6
