BOOKS
Day, Samuel H. Jr.
BOOKS Surviving the Blunders BLUNDERING INTO DISASTER by Robert S. McNamara Pantheon Books, 219 pp. $14.95. by Samuel H. Day Jr. It was shortly after seven in the morning on June 6, 1967....
...Many of these notes went into Upstate, the last book he published and one of his best...
...In his new book, Blundering into Disaster, McNamara recalls the case as one of three instances during his seven years in office (1961-1968) of confrontations carrying a serious risk of military conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union...
...A good deal of life he doesn't understand...
...16.95...
...Finally, doesn't U.S...
...Senator William Prox-mire put it this way: "Defense contractors like General Dynamics have so much leverage against the Government they can flout the laws that govern smaller companies and individuals...
...Well, maybe so...
...At the beginning of World II she met the great love of her life, Joseph von Franckenstein, and left Vail to live with him...
...it is a formula for channeling it into forms less likely to blow up in the faces of those who benefit from the arms race (the military-industrial complex, of which McNamara is a quintessential part...
...A more plausible explanation of McNamara's change of heart is that there has been no change of heart—just the accommodation of old ideas to new realities...
...Some of them are examinations of the heart, the characters, and manners of mankind...
...More than endured, she has persisted in personally defying oppressive and unjust laws, systems, and conventions, whether of art, society, or politics...
...But he has had to trim the strategy to fit the new reality, which is that the policies he helped devise in the 1960s have brought humanity to the brink of disaster...
...Why, then, are Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner read in American literature courses while Boyle is not...
...AMA officials and other special-interest groups (the "giants") often ask, "Where did these people come from...
...Despite a constitutional diffidence he became one of the best journalists, out in all weather to observe and record at first hand...
...I was shocked, although it has been many years since I read Kay Boyle's fiction, and I didn't specifically recall any of her novels except the last one, The Undergraduate Woman (Doubleday, 1975...
...Wilson made two trips to Europe with his fourth wife, Elena...
...Pritchett, with whom Wilson is often compared...
...Paul in 1903 and lived in Europe for nearly thirty years...
...391 pp...
...It was my view in the early 1960s...
...The step could have produced a nuclear confrontation between the superpowers...
...When Edmund Wilson died in 1972, he left notebooks containing more than 2,000 manuscript pages of conversations, episodes, and vignettes covering a period of more than fifty years...
...Star Wars II is a system to protect U.S...
...But they should be aware that alternative approaches would raise more provocative questions than his...
...The Soviet paradox may reflect its American counterpart...
...They, too, have learned nothing from the past...
...And he would ban deployment of Star Wars and other nuclear-weapons departures dear to the heart of the Reagan Administration...
...In the name of enhancing the nation's security, the ruling elite directs its energies outward, instead of cranking up its technological potential and renovating its antiquated industrial plant...
...Thus, Gorbachev was chosen to govern for his proven success at reforming the hidebound administration of agriculture...
...Norton...
...Is it necessary to identify such figures as Edith Wharton, Robert Benchley, and Ralph Ellison...
...She wrote personal novels in the late 1930s when leftist ideology dominated literary criticism, and during World War II she wrote more didactic or propagandistic novels which were popular with the public but disdained by critics...
...When he began to be afflicted with gout, angina, and a variety of other ailments, he would leave his book-strewn house at Wellfleet on Cape Cod to visit for longer and longer stays the old family house at Talcottville, New York...
...Spanier agrees with Harry T. Moore that Boyle was a victim of bad timing...
...He has been involved in various aspects of the legislative process for twenty-five years...
...Like many women who have tried to combine a full personal life with artistic commitment and political activism, Boyle at times found her life extremely difficult but not defeating...
...Today McNamara remains faithful to that vision...
...The latter book reads, Edel says, "like the work of a liberal newspaper columnist and, for all their lucidity and charm, the [observations] are superficial and devoid of the hard thought to be found in his other writings...
...Instead, he finds it to the "credit of our democratic system that the revisions were made by the CIA itself and have been published...
...But he was one of the best of his day...
...Before his death in December he assembled this new collection, his eighth, of some of the best of his recent columns...
...After a period of despair and promiscuity in the Paris of expatriate Americans, and living for a while in Raymond Duncan's commune—all this in her mid-twenties—Boyle married Lawrence Vail, who had had two children with Peggy Guggenheim...
...He was tireless in the pursuit of facts, tireless in speculations that enlivened them...
...Unlike Nin, Boyle came to extend "heart" to the broader political world that Nin largely eschewed...
...I believe they accepted my recommendations...
...They are perhaps too profuse...
...252 pp...
...Professor Harry Levin thinks Wilson's journals may ultimately be considered a counterpart of the great cultural record left in France by the brothers Gon-court...
...Harvey Fireside (Harvey Fireside is professor of politics at Ithaca College in New York...
...From his notebooks and diaries he had been assembling material for The Twenties, a work that was completed later by Leon Edel and published in 1975...
...A skeptic would ask why it took so long to discover this error, and how much of the public still clings to the original distorted image rather than its corrected version...
...In Giant Killers, written with passion and controlled optimism, he describes the work of public-interest lobbyists during five winning campaigns...
...Despite the rhetoric and the considerable change in his public positions since his days as Secretary of Defense, there is no evidence in Blundering into Disaster that McNamara has learned anything from the past...
...The purpose was to tailor the nation's military forces to the Kennedy-McNamara vision of power and influence projected anywhere in the world...
...reflects the thinking of much of the "arms-control" community in the United States...
...Convinced not that Boyle is a Leo Tolstoy or George Eliot of this century but that her writing ranks with F. Scott Fitzgerald and others who cogently reflected the era between two world wars: the flamboyant experimentalism and avant-garde revolt against social conventions of the 1920s and the growing political awareness of the 1930s...
...Unlike such outstanding contemporary writers as Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Sinclair Lewis, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, he did not let alcohol get the better of him...
...This is my view today...
...They deal with a wide range of practical affairs and smack of the world we live in...
...arms industry...
...He argues that this is a better way to strengthen NATO and bolster the defense of Western Europe, leaving it unsaid that stronger conventional forces would also facilitate military intervention in the Third World...
...To a great degree, international aggressiveness may be in the eyes of the beholder...
...Her concern for making political points and social criticism sometimes shapes her characters into one-dimensional mouthpieces...
...They had two children...
...In it are denunciations of the dictatorship in Haiti and his pursuit of the plight of the Jews...
...Of Ring Lardner, he wrote: "Unsatisfied as a writer, and actually inadequately equipped...
...To wit, isn't the U.S...
...Yet the managers of this ailing enterprise have become so accustomed to whipping up their recalcitrant workers that they fall back on coercive measures when propaganda fails, rather than following the Chinese example of the past decade and allowing private initiative to energize the market...
...The criterion of good writing, however, is not its degree of removal from real-life people, but how effectively the characters are drawn...
...Recognizing that further escalation of the nuclear arms race can only lead to Soviet countermeasures that might lead in turn to mutual annihilation, McNamara now proposes that the United States cut a deal with its superpower rival to assure at least a half-share of the pie: Sign the necessary nuclear-arms-limitation agreements, scale down nuclear-weapons levels far enough to remove the planet from terminal danger without jeopardizing the superpower status of either party, and let the rivalry continue through other means...
...That relationship is typical of Boyle's bent for the "connectedness" Spanier emphasizes throughout her book...
...foreign policy have its own series of costly misadventures and dubious alliances...
...However, the notes are designed, Edel explains, for the newest generation of readers...
...Boyle's early experimental style (stream-of-consciousness word flows with no punctuation) was largely abandoned in her growing effort to communicate rather than to "express...
...Soviet Prime Minister Aleksey Kosygin wanted to talk with President Johnson on the "hot line...
...Further, it has been evident that an abysmally low labor productivity makes achievement of even the modest goals of last February's Party Congress highly doubtful...
...Her one association with Kay Boyle occurred in 1960 when Boyle was present at the sentencing of Davidon and twenty-six others who were picked up by the police from the edge of a large crowd demonstrating against New York's civil-defense drills and imprisoned for five days...
...Spanier demonstrates that Boyle's writing has been uneven in this respect...
...Militarily, he became the first Soviet leader to confront the United States on an equal footing in the nuclear arena...
...Why should we accept Bialer's fatalistic judgments, when other noted scholars have been wrong in failing to predict the rise of Khrushchev and the fall of Khrushchev, the advent of de-Stalinization and that of re-Staliniza-tion, the start of detente and its demise...
...Rarely has so much been crammed into one introductory volume and with such verve...
...For one thing, he has already been overtaken by events...
...One might conclude from all this that the man who helped bring us the Vietnam war has seen the error of his ways, has learned from his mistakes, and has thrown in his lot with the peace movement...
...It also presents the mature and mellowed conclusions of a one-time military-policy architect who shapes and Samuel H. Day Jr., a member of The Progressive's Editorial Advisory Board, is a former editor of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists...
...She married a Frenchman by whom she had her first child, and then went to live with a poet, Ernest "Michael" Walsh, until his premature death...
...military spending...
...At various times Boyle criticized the writing of William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway (whom she knew in Paris and personally disliked), but Spanier demonstrates their (particularly Faulkner's) influence on her writing...
...Bialer, who directs the Research Institute on International Change at Columbia University, sketches the internal contradictions of the Soviet economic and political system with wit and clarity...
...As if it weren't astonishing enough to hear these dovish sentiments from such a source, McNamara also reveals himself as a closet anti-nuke from the earliest days of his public service: "I do not believe we can avoid the serious and unacceptable risk of nuclear war until we recognize—and until we base all our military plans, defense budgets, weapons deployments, and arms negotiations on the recognition—that nuclear weapons serve no useful purpose whatsoever...
...The Soviet Paradox is a tour de force...
...The problem was that the Soviet Union was thinking of intervening in behalf of its ally, Egypt, in the Arab-Israeli Six Day War, which had just broken out...
...military-industrial managers who profited from the start of the new arms race...
...She became an ardent antifascist, then an antimilitarist whose commitment led her to augment, often supersede, her writing by direct engagement, such as confronting police at San Francisco State, where she taught during the Vietnam war, and being arrested at induction centers...
...Wilson had a great thirst and capacity for bourbon and martinis...
...Documentaries of American poverty and the depression of the 1930s are recorded in his American Earthquake (1958), a work of political and social reportage...
...a friend asked when I said I was reading this biography...
...A literate and learned man with a gift for writing, often in aphorisms, about life in general, Harris sometimes achieves the astringent sanity of Montaigne or William Hazlitt...
...economic future so unsettled that one should not rush to predict the imminent bankruptcy of the U.S.S.R...
...The need and longing for human connectedness, and its frustrations, are the recurrent theme that Spanier traces from Boyle's earliest works to her latest, despite all changes of style and political ambience...
...In political scientist Seweryn Bialer's view, Mikhail Gorbachev was showered with mixed blessings when he assumed the reins of power in Moscow...
...Author Roger Franklin does a good job of pointing out the problems inherent in the U.S...
...He says there are really two Star Wars proposals...
...With this period Leon Edel will bring to a close a great series, which he has edited superbly—a labor of love, no doubt, for in the later years of Wilson's life, he and Edel were close friends...
...Forster, and others...
...She also entered into a correspondence with Boyle, which developed into a friendship despite an age gap of fifty years...
...Well, that's not quite the case...
...There seems little point in advising a man without shoes to raise himself by his own bootstraps...
...17.95...
...The difficulties and disillusioning experiences of the postwar occupation of Germany, the McCarthy era, and the Vietnam war—all of which affected her personally—did not defeat or embitter her...
...Michael Pertschuk, President Carter's chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, is now chairman of the Advocacy Institute, which counsels public-interest groups in their lobbying activities...
...Although Boyle had no advanced formal education, she was intelligent, with developing knowledge and awareness of the world...
...For all his learning, Wilson was one of the most readable of writers...
...Wilson captured in his notebooks fleeting glimpses of everyday life and personal oddities...
...Costly ventures from Cuba to Afghanistan, from Poland to Vietnam, are squandering a rapidly dwindling stock of resources, though they rally the Russians around the flag...
...Spanier, a faculty member of the State University of New York, drew on this collection during the years she worked on her biography...
...Expert prophecies on Soviet affairs have tended to go awry in the past with disturbing regularity...
...Robert Cantwell called Boyle "one of the most eloquent...
...For those and others who will welcome the old soldier's new pronouncements as fodder for their fantasies of unending imperialism in the nuclear age, Blundering into Disaster is a book aptly named...
...In all cases he has followed Wilson's wish to have his material edited not with "scholarly zeal" but with a "light hand" and to be made as "readable as possible...
...Yet it recurs at odd moments in many of her later novels and stories, along with disruptive flashbacks or mini-histories that have annoyed critics...
...He would rescind the long-standing U.S...
...Except for a lapse during World War II when the combined pressures of patriotism and financial need impelled her to write novels that were almost propaganda tracts, Boyle's writing integrity survived the later decades that have paralleled her own age (she is now eighty-four...
...however, his domestic program has to limit itself, at least in the near term, to cosmetic changes, such as campaigns against alcoholism and corruption, since the bureaucrats insist on maintaining the centralized structure that assures them a dominant position...
...has been propelled into foreign expansion by a leadership whose legitimacy is cast into question as it leaves its citizens mired in a stagnating economy...
...Incurably "romantic" though she may be, her writing deserves to be read and recognized, and her life to be honored...
...Another mild objection to this praiseworthy book is the overabundance of landscape descriptions...
...This was particularly evident in her popular World War II novel, Avalanche, which was scathingly reviewed by Edmund Wilson...
...261 pp...
...They seem to be an addiction of Wilson's...
...Well into his seventies, he would enter a bar and order a half-dozen drinks prepared simultaneously...
...In the changing fashions of textbooks, it may not be shocking to find a scholar's view of the world congruent to the political agenda drawn up in Washington...
...216 pp...
...Far from getting to the roots which have nurtured the nuclear-arms race for its first half-century, the formula is an attempt to protect the roots for the next fifty years...
...His book is simply the reformulation of old strategies for keeping America Number One...
...The leather red and lemon-yellow of the small underbrush of bushes below the permanent green of the pines—the reddened sprigs of the tiny plants among faded grass of the shore...
...military buildup since 1979, especially plans for Star Wars, Bialer's commentary smacks of Ronald Reagan, vintage 1986...
...And readable it certainly is...
...Indeed, despite occasional qualms about the "excessive" nature of the U.S...
...Her characters have been thinly disguised versions of herself, her family, her friends, and their relationships...
...When the 1950s ended, twelve years of Wilson's life remained, years in which he finished his great study of Civil War literature, Patriotic Gore, and published five volumes of earlier writings...
...663 pp...
...This piece of corporate history, The Defender, examines that evolution...
...Southern Illinois University Press, the publisher of this biography, has in its Morris Library an extensive collection of Boyle's books and papers...
...Blundering into Disaster, a book about nuclear-weapons-policy management, looks back at blunders of the first half-century of the nuclear-arms race and offers a plan for surviving the blunders of the next fifty years...
...By the 1980s, their efforts had evolved into General Dynamics, the largest military contractor in the United States...
...Despite all the interruptions of children, thwarted loves, poverty, wars, and deaths of lovers, husbands, and friends, Kay Boyle has endured...
...From first to last, Wilson considered himself a journalist, and in no journalistic venture did he better demonstrate his superior ability than in his investigation of the Scrolls...
...Then he would work his way down a row of six glasses, all the while talking brilliantly...
...William McCann (William McCann is a free-lance writer and critic...
...Inside Russia THE SOVIET PARADOX by Seweryn Bialer Alfred A. Knopf...
...Wilson could report a visit to a Detroit automobile plant or elucidate the poetics of Yeats equally well...
...22.50...
...The inanities are few, the profundities numerous...
...In brief, though Bialer rejects as too "demonic" the image of the Soviet "evil empire" coined by Reagan in 1980, he expounds a thesis of "managed rivalry" that amounts to military-political containment of an "inherently aggressive" adversary...
...During one of them he extended his travels to Israel, where The New Yorker sent him to investigate the mysterious Dead Sea Scrolls and write his findings...
...His style was plain and unadorned, but it had "drive and temperament," said V.S...
...Pertschuk tells us where Kathleen Sheeky, Bill Taylor, David Cohen, and other men and women came from and some of the strategies and techniques they use...
...Miss Boyle, one of the newest, I believe to be among the strongest...
...Now that I have read Sandra Spanier's comprehensive and critical biography and re-read some of Boyle's novels and short-story collections, I am all the more convinced...
...They are totally useless—except to deter one's opponent from using them...
...22.50...
...385 pp...
...Economically, he had to shoulder a system in decline, loaded down with Stalinist encrustations...
...BOOKS BRIEFLY Modern Montaigne CLEARING THE GROUND by Sydney J. Harris Houghton Mifflin...
...Yet 1 had sensed that Kay Boyle, despite general neglect by the literati, was a writer to be heeded and reckoned with...
...Through all this personal turbulence Boyle wrote thirteen novels, short stories, and poetry...
...As Spanier clearly illustrates, Boyle's writing from the beginning has been overtly personal and autobiographical...
...The critical point is not just the uncertainty inherent in Bialer's theme but the slant of his interpretations...
...Star Wars I is the magic shield, which only Reagan believes in...
...For four decades, Sydney Harris wrote one of the country's most respected newspaper columns...
...Wilson could be benign and generous, but he had a sure touch for disparaging remarks...
...There are long, interesting conversations with Vladimir Nabokov, Andre Malraux, W.H...
...Who is Kay Boyle...
...He applauds the President for having undertaken a "necessary and positive" replenishment of the nuclear-weapons arsenal in order to catch up to the Soviets, and he seems to take satisfaction in the knowledge that they "will find it much more difficult and costly to keep up" with the accelerated pace of U.S...
...At that time, in long conversations with successive Presidents—Kennedy and Johnson—I recommended, without qualification, that they never initiate, under any circumstances, the use of nuclear weapons...
...Heart Over Head KAY BOYLE: Artist and Activist by Sandra Whippier Spanier Southern Illinois University Press...
...By the dialectical logic of Bialer's new book, The Soviet Paradox, the U.S.S.R...
...Among them were passage of the 1984 law on cigarette labels and advertising, defeat of the American Medical Association's efforts to escape consumer-protection laws, and defeat of the MX missile in 1984...
...Katherine Anne Porter once wrote: "Gertrude Stein and James Joyce were and are the glories of their time and some very portentous talents have emerged from their shadows...
...During the 1950s he wrote only two books, The Scrolls from the Dead Sea (1955), much of which originally appeared in The New Yorker, and A Piece of My Mind (1956...
...McNamara's proposed solutions are no less arresting: He would scale back the superpowers' arsenals of nuclear bombs and warheads from the present 50,000 or so to no more than 500 each—just enough to provide deterrence without totally messing up the planet if deterrence failed...
...Amid its array of elegant disquisitions, Bialer offers a historical account of how the Soviet Union got into its current economic bind, an analysis of the Machiavellian twists marking the succession of crises of the past four years, a survey of recent shifts in U.S.Soviet relations, and an ironic group portrait of the embattled East European states that form "the only surviving empire in the world...
...policy of first use of nuclear weapons in the event of battlefield reverses in Europe, a policy which has been a key fixture of NATO since the earliest days of the Western alliance...
...Like her contemporary, Anais Nin, Boyle emphasized the heart over the head...
...Contractor Clout THE DEFENDER: THE STORY OF GENERAL DYNAMICS by Roger Franklin Harper & Row...
...McNamara's critique of Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative is devastatingly on target...
...When Wilson called Voltaire a "fast-producing journalist with a style based on conversation," Levin felt Wilson was aptly characterizing himself...
...Boyle was born in St...
...Her search for fresh images and metaphors sometimes leads her into absurd cul-de-sacs, and there is a dated quality in some of her phrasings...
...In one central passage, for example, he relates the recent disclosure "that CIA appraisals of Soviet military spending since 1976 were faulty and that it was probably only half of the presented percentage of GNP...
...Wilson kept his diaries and journals of the 1950s in a more systematic way, making it, Edel found, the most difficult of the four books to edit...
...This short, fat man with a wheezing voice, who wore floppy, dark suits, floppy hats, and carried a tattered briefcase, surely did not look like an "investigative reporter...
...Auden, Max Beerbohm, Cyril Connolly, E.M...
...his mind is rather two-dimensional, as his physical appearance seemed incomplete...
...In that time, the Bomb has proliferated almost beyond imagination and the world has survived several more near-misses—in the Middle East, in Vietnam, and elsewhere...
...He deals, as Edel says, with "both inanities and profundities...
...Nor can the Kremlin adopt the one European model that still seems viable—Hungary's "New Economic Mechanism"—because it is based on decentralization, while the Soviet leaders have convinced themselves that without rigid controls their subjects would lapse into anarchic indolence or rebellion...
...The others were over Berlin in August 1961 and Cuba in October 1962...
...Through the 1930s she and Vail had three daughters and lived a peripatetic, but literarily productive, life...
...Although Bialer has succeeded in his stated aim—enlightening the general reader with materials generally expounded to conclaves of specialists—he may have overdrawn the certainty of his forecasts...
...McNamara's formula fits neatly into the thinking of a growing number of Democratic Party leaders (Gary Hart, Les Aspin, the Democratic Policy Commission) whose strategy for regaining political power is to outflank Reagan's militarism with a fresh brand of their own: expanded conventional forces, nuclear-arms limitations on "destabilizing" weapons, and "modernized" nuclear systems less vulnerable and more versatile than their predecessors...
...Reaching for another telephone, the Secretary dialed the White House and spoke to the Air Force sergeant whose job was to monitor night-time messages for the President...
...After a long wait, McNamara heard the familiar tones of a gruff and sleepy voice: "Goddamn it, Bob, what is the problem...
...The heroes of Pertschuk's stories are unsung...
...Wilson's liberal ideas are embodied in Red, Black, Blond, and Olive (1956), one of the five collections of earlier writings he published in the 1950s...
...A quarter of a century ago, McNamara was the managerial expert whom John Kennedy brought in to modernize the nation's military machine, to substitute "flexible response" for the ungainly nuclear doctrine of "massive retaliation," to miniaturize and rationalize a nuclear-weapons force that had grown too cumbersome to be credible, to whip the Pentagon into shape...
...writers among the expatriates...
...He could not write, he said, without first washing his hands...
...offensive weapons, which is what the rest of the Administration is shooting for...
...Unsung Heroes GIANT KILLERS by Michael Pertschuk W.W...
...One would expect Bialer to continue by questioning the reasons for this gross exaggeration of Soviet strength and to trace it to the U.S...
...Every writer, of course, writes about his or her own experiences, observations, and perceptions, but those who do so obscurely and discreetly are often considered more "balanced" and "objective...
...My friend, an intelligent graduate of Columbia University, is around forty...
...Though a bit pompous, the book is easy to read...
...In the 1870s, a group of British-hating Irish immigrants in New York built a submarine with which they hoped to humiliate the Royal Navy...
...In practical terms, McNamara's plan for eliminating or reducing the risk of nuclear war boils down to a pitch for substantial beefing up of the nation's conventional military forces...
...He organizes his material in this volume into four categories: "Of the Social Animal," "Of the Life of the Spirit," "Of the Mind and Passions," and "Of the Fine and Vulgar Arts...
...Ann Morrissett Davidon (Ann Morrissett Davidon is a free-lance writer and peace activist...
...Alcohol seemed only to banish his innate shyness...
...Many of them come from working-class families, and few went to elite colleges...
...22.95...
...The numerous footnotes are conveniently placed at the end of the book's three dozen chapters...
...On that basis they probably deserve our approbation...
...He has written widely on Soviet affairs and human rights...
...The danger of nuclear annihilation has grown steadily greater in the eighteen years since McNamara, former president of the Ford Motor Company, moved from the Pentagon to the World Bank to semi-retirement as an oracle on matters of international security and development...
...The search for connections, whether in love, family, friendships, or common humanity, is pursued by Boyle through her novels and stories, as in her personal life...
...Students of Soviet politics will find Bialer an erudite guide along moderate conservative pathways...
...Readers are likely to finish the book with no inclination to dispute Saul Bellow's judgment that Harris was "the perfect master of the short essay form...
...This is not a formula for ending the nuclear-arms race...
...Within this central paradox, Bialer discovers a nest of smaller conundrums...
...Few writers have worked so hard to know a country and its people, and not alone in books," wrote Brendan Gill, a colleague at The New Yorker...
...Here he set down with memorable skill impressions of the members of his family who lived nearby and other inhabitants of the village, for whom he felt a curious affinity...
...He outdrank and outlived them all...
...In reading two books about postwar Germany, Generation without Farewell, her 1960 novel, and The Smoking Mountain, a 1951 collection of short stories, I felt in Boyle's dialogues and descriptions an immediacy of that era that transcended any contemporary limitations of style...
...Edel has since edited The Thirties, The Forties, and now The Fifties, probably the next-to-last volume in this absorbing series...
...Cultural Record THE FIFTIES by Edmund Wilson Farrar, Straus & Giroux...
...Gore Vidal once observed that Wilson was a compulsive writer who felt instinctively that a running description of what he saw from a train window or in an air terminal was worth setting down...
...Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, an early riser, was interrupted at his Pentagon desk by a call from the general on duty in the War Room...
Vol. 51 • February 1987 • No. 2
