Books Briefly
Elliott, Fred W. Friendly and Martha J.H.
Books Briefly Great Debates THE CONSTITUTION: THAT DELICATE BALANCE by Fred W. Friendly and Martha J.H. Elliott Random House. 339 pp. $17.95. Designed to accompany a public television series by...
...Pawel argues that Kafka was a closet Zionist, but since Kafka never came out as a Zionist, despite much talk of the matter, this biography becomes a willful attempt to force Kafka into allegiance with Pawel's own Zionist enthusiasms...
...For example, little mention is made of Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 school desegregation case, and Baker v. Can, the legislative reapportionment decision that Chief Justice Earl Warren called his most important ruling, is not noted at all...
...The "delicate balance" is the tension between personal rights and the rights of society...
...A worrier from the beginning, he now, in his eighty-fifth year, contemplates with foreboding a world threatened with nuclear war that may "bring the planet to the verge of extinction...
...To use his phrase, White always "kept the minutes of his own meeting...
...Designed to accompany a public television series by the same name, That Delicate Balance is a series of disparate essays dealing with a sampling of Supreme Court decisions...
...According to Ernst Pawel, the neurotic and somber life of novelist Franz Kafka has never been explained in a relevant context...
...WHITE: A BIOGRAPHY by Scott Elledge W. W. Norton...
...To biographer Pawel, the context is the middle-class Jewish culture of Prague, where the author of The Trial and The Castle was reared and educated, where he worked (as an insurance administrator) and was buried in 1924 after a slow death from consumption...
...White contributed over the years to The New Yorker and Harper's and his published letters may well doubt that a biography could add much to their understanding and appreciation of one of America's finest writers...
...Kafka's Closet THE NIGHTMARE OF REASON: A LIFE OF FRANZ KAFKA by Ernst Pawel Farrar, Straus & Giroux...
...The selection is rather odd...
...22.50...
...25.50...
...Previous biographers and literary critics, Pawel says, have not sufficiently discussed Kafka's Jewish roots...
...Beneath White's humor there is always a strain of high seriousness...
...Readers of the essays and verse that E.B...
...Biographer Scott Elledge, an English professor at Cornell, White's alma mater, has written a good book...
...A Modern Thoreau E.B...
...Nevertheless, the general reader will get a feel for the human elements that are involved in the great constitutional debates, and the book makes for lively reading...
...400 pp...
...He quotes extensively and wisely from White's writings and puts in focus the details of White's career at The New Yorker, his happy marriage to Katharine Sergeant Angell, and his long love affair with their farm on the Maine coast...
...448 pp...
...This seems not only an injustice to Kafka but dubious scholarship...
Vol. 49 • January 1985 • No. 1
