BOOKS

...the second...

...Like Herzog, another of Bellow's comic professors, Trachtenberg is something of an intellectual shlimazel, a born loser...

...As Miller explains, when SDS members went out to organize, they did so primarily in small experimental collectives cut off from the broader society they hoped to reach...

...Kinky Times MORE DIE OF HEARTBREAK by Saul Bellow William Morrow...

...His subjects include such veterans of Port Huron as Sharon Jeffrey, Bob Ross, Al Haber, Richard Flacks, and Tom Hayden...

...In the long run, the collectives could not be sustained and the goal of creating larger face-to-face democratic communities proved entirely elusive...

...If you venture to think in America, you also feel an obligation to provide a historical sketch to go with it, to authenticate or legitimize your thoughts...

...Bellow seems equally upset by the sexual materialism of the times, as if sex and women were the causes of America's malaise...

...19.95 by Bill Blum On June 12, 1962, fifty-nine young people, mainly in their early twenties, gathered at the old UAW camp in Port Huron, Michigan, to draft a platform for a new kind of radical politics...

...Among the contributing factors that Miller cites was the pervasive influence of Vietnam, which inflated the ranks of SDS but divided the student Left from the trade unions and prevented it from concentrating on domestic issues...

...300 pp...

...White once said wryly that his wife's three passions were The New Yorker, her son Roger, and himself, in that order...

...On the other hand, Ken points out that this is "a century of hybrids, and that if you weren't one, if you asserted that you lived by a classical, traditional standard, as some people took credit for doing, you were out of it...

...an experimental collective embarked on a high-risk effort to test the limits of democracy in modern life...

...22.50...

...Each essay is surprisingly different from the others...

...When they were married in 1929, Katharine Angell was thirty-seven and E.B...

...Science itself is ignorant in this branch of knowledge...

...These essays are more than testimonies of faith and dedication by twenty-four of the people who have taken part in Plowshares actions around the country...

...Every reader—especially those who struggled through the decade and are no longer burdened by the free-lance existence of youth—will gain a better understanding of the recent past from his book...

...Borrowed from one of Hayden's political science professors at the University of Michigan, the term was prominently featured in the Port Huron Statement, which loudly proclaimed the SDS goal of establishing a society in which individuals would share in all decisions affecting the quality of their lives...

...What Jeffrey and others overlooked at the time was that for the movement to survive, participatory democracy had to be viewed not as an all-or-nothing, self-sacrificing substitute for mainstream institutions, but as a complement to them, as an ideal capable of exerting incremental change over the long haul...

...Davis succeeds in showing Katharine White's skill in working with writers, including Vladimir Nabokov, John Updike, Jean Stafford, and Mary McCarthy...

...Sharon Jeffrey's amusing anecdotes about eighteen-hour meetings convened to decide whether collective members could take a day off to go to the beach go a long way toward explaining why...

...Yet Bellow's elitist put-down of American culture reads very much like Allan Bloom's Olympian critique, The Closing of the American Mind, for which Bellow wrote the foreword...

...It's Uncle Benn who proposes repeatedly the slogan that more people die of heartbreak than radiation, yet no one seems to be able to do anything about it...

...Symbolic and dramatic physical attacks on weapons may seem futile to those of us accustomed to thinking that words can somehow stop Armageddon...

...A former anarchist, the author of four books, and now a Newsweek music critic, Miller traces the evolution of SDS and the New Left by focusing on the lives and careers of several well-known activists...

...For everyone who feared that the movie The Big Chill would be the last word on the 1960s, Miller succeeds in crafting a perceptive and balanced appraisal of the rise and fall of the movement that was spawned at Port Huron and troubles us still with its unfulfilled promises and broken dreams...

...Ultimately, two visions of participatory democracy emerged: "the first a face-to-face community sharing interests in common...

...One needs to be careful not to confuse Bellow with his characters...

...335 pp...

...these are kinky times and "men and women are determined to get out of one another (or tear out) what is simply not to be gotten by any means...

...In Democracy Is in the Streets, James Miller treats the conference as the constitutional convention of the New Left...

...The movement's collapse, of course, was not due exclusively to muddled praxis...

...Then, too, there was the very youth of the activists...

...They are also eloquent explanations of the reasons, personal and political, that these disparate individuals—priests and parents, teachers and farmers—came to take direct action against arms (in particular, components of first-strike nuclear missiles...

...More recently he has begun to sound not only genteel but, you should excuse the expression, positively gentile...

...As Miller quotes Richard Flacks: "There [was] a timeless quality about the movement," embodying "an assumption that one always will be a student or an ex-student— leading the free-lance, experimental, not-tied-down existence of youth...

...Back in America he reverses James's international theme in which an innocent American encounters the complexity (and often the depravity) of European culture...

...Miller has interviewed all of them, and their reflections are interspersed throughout...

...245 pp...

...Gene Bluestein (Gene Bluestein teaches at California State University, Fresno...

...In Ken's case this situation is exacerbated by the fact that his lover is "either very clever or playing by clever rules, those different rules based on the, to me, foreign assumptions of a new generation of young women...

...Ken Trachtenberg is a professor of comparative literature who specializes in Russian mysticism...

...The Whites were apolitical nonjoiners, but were deeply devoted to civil liberties and civil rights...

...His great attraction is to his Uncle Benn, "a Jewish botanist...

...Biblical references and injunctions abound, but a reader does not have to be religious to appreciate the poetic force of the words used and actions taken by these courageous few, most of whom served or are serving prison terms...

...So it's one moment of flashing insight and then a quarter of an hour of pedantry and tiresome elaboration—academic gabble...

...Miller captures the passion, the aspirations, and the personal, political, and generational conflicts of the era as few others have...

...Davis indulges in some dubious amateur psychologizing, but she convincingly presents a complex woman ahead of her times...

...In this biography of Katharine S. White, Linda Davis concentrates on her professional career and remarkably harmonious marriage...

...The narrator is Ken Trachtenberg, an American who has been brought up in Europe and decides to return to the United States "where the action is" because he is convinced "we've never had a historical moment quite like this one, sexually different from Babylon or Rome, different from Ancient India...

...Here they are able to present the justification defense that judges have denied them in courts...

...8.95 paperback...

...His new in-laws force Benn into a distasteful financial battle with another relative...

...Lacking credible role models within the Old Left and meaningful ties to society as a whole, the new politics of Port Huron soon degenerated into a politics of romanticism, violence, and, finally, despair...

...Bill Blum is an attorney in Los Angeles and a free-lance writer...

...Under the influence of desire, Benn is, like all of us, a "phoenix who runs after arsonists...

...They teach a course together at the University of Chicago...

...But while the ideal served as a beacon of inspiration, it was fraught with ambiguity...

...But overriding the somewhat complicated plot is Bellow's real concern: to provide a treatise on sex and sexuality in modern American life...

...17.95 Like the narrator of his new novel, More Die of Heartbreak, Saul Bellow has been reading Balzac and it's no surprise that the result is a novel which reminds us of Balzac's influence on American writing, especially his impact on the work of Henry James...

...And the reason is clear: We live in the midst of a sexual revolution...

...He describes himself as "a peculiarly American type...

...One is left with the discomforting feeling that while this quixotic crew has been sounding alarms and hauling out the lifeboats, most of us have been dancing on the decks of the Titanic...

...That's symptomatic of all the problems Ken encounters when he returns to America from Europe...

...She came from a solid New England background, was educated at Bryn Mawr, and grew up professionally under the tutelage of The New Yorker's demanding founding editor, Harold Ross...

...As his father, "an outstanding cocksman," explains, "We don't know women, son...

...It was this concept that SDS leaders carried with them as they set forth to build the new America: Jeffrey as she established the Economic Research and Action Project for interracial organizing in Cleveland, Hayden as he set up a similar enterprise in Newark, and Flacks in the formal halls of academia...

...Bellow, who knows Yiddish well enough to have done wonderful translations of Sholom Aleichem, is aware that in Yiddish ken trachten means "able to think," and that's about all that Ken Trachtenberg can do...

...Appendices include a blunt piece by the late Sidney Lens on the economic basis of the arms race...

...According to Miller—and many will no doubt disagree on this point—SDS and the New Left unraveled not so much because of the overwhelming odds encountered in transforming America, but because they never resolved in practice what their central ideal really meant...

...Arriving, I felt conspicuously foreign...

...But in fact Iranians are driving the taxis, Koreans and Syrians own the vegetable markets, Mexicans wait on tables, an Egyptian services my television set, Japanese students take my Russian courses____Henry James, who was moved to ecstasies when he saw Italians in Italy, was depressed to meet them in Connecticut...

...Katharine S. White ONWARD AND UPWARD by Linda H. Davis Harper & Row...

...They came to hammer out a manifesto for a tiny organization called Students for a Democratic Society, which at the time was the youth group of the equally obscure League for Industrial Democracy...

...What Bellow wants is not clear...

...Ken neglects to mention that James was disgusted by the Jews he saw in New York...

...Bloom would like our vulgar culture to be ruled by Platonic philosopher-kings...

...She did some writing—reviewed children's books and wrote "Onward and Upward in the Garden" pieces—but editing was her strong suit...

...If a central animating principle of the new politics was articulated at Port Huron, it was the notion of participatory democracy...

...There are many James-ean themes, including family conspiracies against the freedom of the individual...

...In the past, Bellow's commitment to Jewish values has kept him from American conformity and what Tocqueville called "the tyranny of the majority...

...She was fiction editor of The New Yorker, for which he was a staff writer...

...who moves into the vegetable kingdom, studying leaves, bark, roots, heartwood, sapwood, flowers, for their own sake...

...Ken is enamored of his innocent but crisis-prone Uncle Benn, who is himself enmeshed in a new marriage that has all the earmarks of a hustle...

...BOOKS BRIEFLY Testaments SWORDS INTO PLOWSHARES edited by Arthur Laffin and Anne Montgomery Harper & Row...

...Unfortunately, Uncle Benn's botany "had a rival, which was female sexuality...

...It is a work in which there is little action but a great deal of cerebral adventure...

...Her correspondence with writers was prolific, and continued even through her last decade of illness until her death at eighty-four...

...In this and other respects America is a foreign experience for Ken: "Such an American place...

...White was thirty...

...Not even after a lifetime of observation, practically research...

...One would like to think that sending this book to every jaded judge, cornpone Congressman, and pious PTL preacher might convert them all, but Plowshares participants above all know the limitations of words...

...The unwed father of a little girl, he is rejected by the mother because she's a hippie who likes a little S and M in her life and Trachtenberg isn't quite up to it...

...Uncle Benn runs from his wife into the arctic wastes where desire can be frozen...