Books Briefly
Books Briefly The Unbeloved Country FREEDOM RISING by James North Macmillan. 336 pp. $19.95. Here's a first-hand, sand-in-the-shoe account of life in South Africa. Written by the pseudonymous...
...North seems to delight in recounting his savvy interviewing techniques and his easy access to the underground black movement...
...Contested Legacy EMERGENCE OF A FREE PRESS by Leonard W. Levy Oxford University Press...
...newspapers, you would be well advised to read this book...
...Here are detailed proposals for circumventing and peacefully undermining the big corporate systems that try to run our lives, with encouraging examples of successful grass-roots efforts...
...175 pp...
...Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896) wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin as a series of sketches for The National Era, an anti-slavery newspaper which paid her $300...
...254 pp...
...The value of Reynolds's book is enhanced with photographs, maps, and a selected bibliography...
...A play based on the book appeared on the American stage continuously from 1853 to 1930...
...Unfortunately, few people outside enlightened groups (food co-ops, tenants' organizations, antinuclear units) will be aware of the existence of this small volume, which contains hope and hard-nosed advice for getting a handle on our lives, here and now...
...But he loads the dice by titling the chapter on the subject "Gandhi's Heirs," thereby strongly implying that the practitioners of violence are direct descendants of the founder of nonviolence...
...29.95...
...If you have never read it, you should," critic Edmund Wilson once said...
...18.95...
...Though his principal thesis stands, he now concedes that there has been, from the beginning, a strong and consistent effort to expand freedom of speech and press in this country...
...Levy's argument had no appeal for those accustomed to invoking a hallowed American tradition of free speech, but unfortunately he made a persuasive, well-documented case...
...It still packs a wallop...
...This new, expanded edition of the American Friends Service Committee's handbook, Taking Charge, is an exciting collection of challenges and practical alternatives to the economic and social systems that dominate our lives and threaten the planet...
...For two years the presses were unable to keep up with the demand...
...Uncle Tom's Creator UNCLE TOM'S CABIN AND MID-NINETEENTH CENTURY UNITED STATES by Moira Davison Reynolds McFarland & Company (Jefferson, NC 28640...
...Moira Davison Reynolds, an accomplished biochemist turned writer, has produced an informative and interesting study of the famous novel, its author, the anti-slavery movement, and the social history of the period...
...The forty-year-old wife of a poorly paid college professor and mother of seven children found the time and stamina to produce one of the most influential novels ever written in America...
...A Handle on Living TAKING CHARGE OF OUR LIVES by the American Friends Service Committee Harper & Row...
...that's all right, he's entitled...
...Levy advanced the dispiriting thesis that the Founders—including even such libertarians as Madison and Jefferson-were by no means committed to the freedom to criticize the Government...
...Emergence of a Free Press is an expanded and revised version of the earlier book, and Levy, now chairman of the graduate faculty of history at the Clare-mont Graduate School, gracefully admits to at least a partial change of heart...
...8.95...
...In 1852, the serialized novel was published as a book...
...383 pp...
...Written by the pseudonymous James North, who returned in 1983 from a four-and-a-half-year journey through southern Africa, this book offers fresh, valuable insights into the psychology of South Africa's whites (both racist and radical), the reality of apartheid, and, as the title suggests, the progressing struggle for black liberation...
...The book is pockmarked, however, by the author's intrusive ego...
...Also, the section on Zimbabwe seems perfunctory...
...The essential aspects of living that are explored include food, shelter, community, work, children, health, aging, energy, consumption, and world connections...
...A more substantive problem is the way North treats the conundrum of nonviolence in the South African context...
...Rather, they accepted and supported long-standing notions of seditious libel...
...He obviously thinks nonviolence is irrelevant, if not foolhardy...
...When Leonard W. Levy's Legacy of Suppression, described by its author as a "revisionist history" of freedom of speech and press in the United States, was published a quarter of a century ago, it troubled many champions of the First Amendment...
...This lively and important book underscores the need for defending—and exercising—one's rights...
...the first edition sold out in two days...
...Still, to get a sense of South Africa beyond the simplistic stories that clutter U.S...
...What about Uncle Tom's Cabin today...
Vol. 49 • September 1985 • No. 9
