Books Briefly
Books Briefly Antiwar Activism THE PHOENIX TRIP: NOTES ON A QUAKER MISSION TO HAIPHONG by Elizabeth Jelinek Boardman Celo Press (Route 5, Burnsville, NC 28714). 174 pp. $22.50 hardcover. $9.95...
...Nevertheless, the voyage succeeded in its medical mission and garnered much favorable publicity...
...Helene Hanff knows how to squeeze an orange dry...
...The North Vietnamese, merging innate hospitality with shrewd public relations, took over once the yacht docked...
...Here the affair continues with a tour of "literary sights" she has been invited to visit...
...One of the most daring and creative actions of the nonviolent movement during the Vietnam war, it also served as a microcosm of the antiwar struggle...
...tensions strained crew relations and caused illness, compounding such unavoidable problems as seasickness and spoiled food...
...Witty Bookworm Q'S LEGACY by Helene Hanff Little, Brown...
...The crew planned to deliver medical supplies and offer friendship and support to the North Vietnamese people...
...This includes a trip to Harrow with a young student and stops at the houses of Jane Austen and George Bernard Shaw and tea at Quiller-Couch's old quarters at Cambridge...
...14.95...
...Boardman's memoir is as interesting as it is instructive...
...9.95 paperback...
...Although Quaker principles were supposed to govern, power struggles erupted repeatedly...
...177 pp...
...In 1967, a Quaker action group organized the first of three voyages to North Vietnam on Earle Reynolds's yacht, the Phoenix...
...In her earlier books, 84, Charing Cross Road, and The Duchess of Bloomsbury, readers learned of her long love affair with books, stimulated by exposure to the works of Q—Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch...
...They overturned the crew's prearranged plans and substituted a tour which provoked great guilt and further eroded crew solidarity...
...It is unfortunate that it wasn't published earlier, before so many other peace projects made the same mistakes...
...A grateful tribute to the scholar who guided her reading...
...She manages to turn her ordeal with cataracts into wit...
...Boardman, a middle-aged housewife, first had to overcome her husband's objections and then, throughout the trip, had to resist the male chauvinism of her colleagues...
Vol. 50 • April 1986 • No. 4
