BOOKS

...Thomas Fleming is not your run-of-the-media right-winger...

...Pam Solo, the author and one of the leaders of the Freeze, refuses simply to chronicle the rise and fall of the Freeze...

...Those lines from The Scarlet Letter are Updike's epigraph to 5. but they have almost no relevance to Sarah Worth...

...They remembered enough of their yesterdays to tell us what it was like to live in those times...

...intervention in Central America...

...I remember when Lyndon Johnson, compelled to reduce domestic spending to pay for the war in Vietnam, proposed a cutback in school lunch and school milk programs...

...During 1988-1989 he is visiting professor of American Studies at Hunan State University in Changsha, People's Republic of China...

...Clerical and technical workers at universities have traditionally been among the hardest people to organize into unions...

...The moral, according to Bonner: "It's hard to write against the prevailing wisdom in Washington, no matter who is in power...

...Labor unions, along with Big Guv'ment, which my two young friends also abhor, may have brought it forth, but that's ancient history...

...Terkel interviews a television wunder-kind who tells him that everything now depends on faster communication...

...And we know what Henry Ford said about history...

...That important point almost gets lost in On Bended Knee...

...He is an authoritarian who dismisses democracy and disdains justice as threats to "the natural order"— and who finds, surprisingly enough, that the natural order just happens to coincide with his notions of the ideal society...

...His personal vision came across in a half-dozen previous works, including Hard Times, Working, and The "Good" War, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1985...

...There are many sly references to Hawthorne, but none can undo the Updike obsession with woman as the eternal "O...

...Nonetheless, they remembered core truths about themselves and the world around them...

...Here once again are samples of the fine draftsmanship and potent political impact of John Sloan, George Bellows, Robert Minor, Art Young, Boardman Robinson, and other American masters...

...That it is a business is the most important point driven home in On Bended Knee, and it is the most significant consideration in any assessment of media performance...

...Every few years, someone publishes a new volume of art from the old Masses, and each creates its own astonishment...

...As historian Dave Roediger notes in his perceptive foreword to this fascinating memoir, Harvey and Jessie Lloyd O'Connor were fellow travelers in the best senses of that much-abused term...

...The authors, who supported the union in student and faculty solidarity actions, stressed the rank-and-file involvement of the workers, 82 per cent of whom were women...

...From the Surgeon General of the United States to your local dietician, everyone urges Americans to eat more fruits and vegetables...

...Sarah's story is told exclusively in her own voice through letters and tapes to friends and family, a nice way of subtly supplying the cultural and social framework...

...Today, amnesia is much easier to come by...

...His own "second thoughts," the book's subtitle, seem to represent a hiatus, not a permanent condition...

...Updike's Mantra S. by John Updike Alfred A. Knopf...

...They include yuppies, right-wing fundamentalists, backers of the Sanctuary movement, despairing liberals, former social activists from the 1960s who have become stockbrokers and real-estate speculators, a flight attendant who is on strike and her pilot husband who crosses her picket line, a police chief whose wife gets jailed for participating in antiwar demonstrations, students so money-oriented that they start investment clubs in high school...

...That remains Updike's mantra...

...Reading the voices in his book—and they are real voices, not anonymous pollster voices—you get the impression that many Americans have become immunized against reality...

...170 pp...

...She had "assumed a freedom of speculation, then common enough on the other side of the Atlantic, but which our forefathers, had they known it, would have held to be a deadlier crime than that stigmatized by the scarlet letter...

...We meet a cross-section of Americans in The Great Divide...

...But progressives and radicals could benefit from grappling with Fleming's intellectually stimulating presentation...

...His muckraking labor journalism—especially his book, Mellon's Millions—has lasting value...

...S. deals with Hester, the heroic figure who dominates the book Hawthorne called a "romance," his alternative to the conventional novel...

...They let you know the hazards associated with each pesticide, whether it be cancer, birth defects, kidney and liver ailments, or other serious illnesses...

...I encountered in survivors of the Great Depression and World War Two egregious lapses, blockages, and forgetter-ies...

...Erwin Knoll (Erwin Knoll, the Editor of The Progressive, covered the White House in the Johnson Administration...

...When he asked them how their eight-hour day came to be, their fresh faces are "pure Mondrian: the absence of any detail—the furrowed brow, the thoughtful squint...

...Communicator ON BENDED KNEE: The Press and the Reagan Presidency by Mark Hertsgaard Farrar Strauss Giroux...

...It doesn't happen...

...Her immediate boss, a young accountant who describes himself as "management," nods solemnly...

...he has devoted himself to reviving the spirit of patriotism across the country...

...The Old Right THE POLITICS OF HUMAN NATURE by Thomas Fleming Transaction Books...

...Their joint memoir, compiled with the assistance of free-lance writer Susan M. Bowler, is an engaging portrait of two people devoted to each other and to all humanity, and it provides instructive glimpses of the travails and triumphs of the Left in our time...

...17.95...

...And by the end, an internal emphasis on process became a fetish that stalled action and stultified creativity...

...The world's law was no law for her mind...

...Lessons of the Freeze FROM PROTEST TO POLICY: Beyond the Freeze to Common Security by Pam Solo Ballinger...

...Fellow Travelers HARVEY AND JESSIE: A Couple of Radicals by Jessie Lloyd O'Connor, Harvey O'Connor, and Susan M. Bowler Temple University Press...

...Standing alone in the world,— alone, as to any dependence on society, and with little Pearl to be guided and protected,—alone, and hopeless of retrieving her position, even had she not scorned to consider it desirable,—she cast away the fragments of a broken chain...

...Profit-obsessed corporations...

...The Nation, The Progressive—the liberals who've never had power in this country and don't now...

...Early on, for tactical reasons, it stopped discussing the goal of disarmament and the vision of an alternative-security arrangement...

...So when the 2,600 secretaries, librarians, and lab technicians at Yale University won union recognition in 1983, held a successful ten-week strike, and secured their first contract in 1985, it marked a breakthrough for the labor movement...

...As technology has become more hyperactive, we, the people, have become more laid-back...

...This short, squat paperback gives the detailed account of how the campaign was won...

...I've had the experience of talking into Terkel's tape recorder from time to time...

...The authors point out how agribusinesses have brought this plague of pesticides upon the land, and how the U.S...

...Because the book focuses on the Reagan years, it's easy to lose sight of the fact that the problem is neither new nor about to be solved with Reagan's departure from office...

...Updike's sexist view of woman relegates Sarah to the same status whether she is in Massachusetts or in the ashram where her guru explains, "Buddhahood is in the female organ...

...Mystery: For all the worried headlines of air crashes and near misses, with more than occasional references to understaffed, overworked, and unseasoned air controllers, hardly any mention has ever been made of the non-persons: 11,000 blacklisted seasoned air controllers...

...The people covered by Terkel in the recent past had an animated spirit...

...But it is also a story of what can go right...

...In his periodic encounters with foreign leaders, Reagan has blurted out the most amazing bits of nonsense, but more frequently he has used occasions of state to catch a few winks of much-needed and refreshing sleep—often in full view of the world's press...

...Not surprisingly, the authors call for reducing the reliance on chemical pesticides and for strengthening the regulatory agencies...

...Whether reading from a prepared text or engaging in off-the-cuff repartee, Reagan has uttered blatant falsehoods that can only be construed as deliberate attempts to deceive the people of the United States and of the world—about the American raid on Libya, for example, or the invasion of Grenada, or systematic U.S...

...Here as elsewhere in the novel, Updike's condescension toward Sarah results in such stilted and awkward langauge...

...In The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne wrote a brilliant description of the status of woman in a sexist, guilt-ridden society...

...Rather, she grapples with the fundamental causes of "the movement's co-optation and erosion...

...Why, our mass media, of course—the very same institutions that are supposed to serve as our principal vehicles of communication...

...She argues, convincingly, that the Freeze fell into the arms-control trap, narrowly debating which weapons to support and which to oppose, instead of challenging the premises of the arms race and the Cold War...

...But reporters do care about criticism from those in power...

...It is the split in the sphere of worship, rendering unto Caesar what may not rightfully be his and unto God what may not spiritually be His...

...But here, he says, is what he heard in the 1980s: "The Great Divide bespeaks more than the deepening chasm between the haves— and have-somewhats—and the have-nots...

...The produce you may be buying could be hazardous to your health—courtesy of the pesticide industry...

...The book's climax is the moment when Arhat stops mumbling about Mahapari-nirvana and makes his move on Sarah: "And once he slipped out of—what can I call it?—his Masterhood, his cosmic distance, and perched forward on that big silver-threaded armchair he uses as a sort of throne to grab my ass, I had this incredible wave of pity, of wanting to open myself the way I used to to little Pearl, to become this brainless fountain of life...

...In the process, they diluted the Freeze's message and deflected its attention...

...Against a background of such comments, repeated throughout the book, Updike's other interests fade from sight...

...Fleming, a poet, essayist, classical scholar, and the editor of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture, is a thoughtful conservative of the old school—a type more common in Europe than in our born-yesterday culture...

...15.95 hardcover, $6.95 paper...

...The scene is based on the Oregon commune of Rajneeshpuram, though Updike disclaims any real connection...

...Sarah remains a compulsive puritanical bourgeoise who can never forget the Cal-vinist ideology "which presents earthly prosperity as a sign of divine election...

...It is difficult for a contemporary reader to avoid the feeling that something wonderful has been lost...

...Then he adds: "It was unfair of me...

...For a few years just before U.S...

...But they call Reagan the Great Communicator...

...The strikers' work was unappreciated and underpaid, and they took up the issue of "pay equity" with enthusiasm...

...In a blue-collar suburb inhabited by congenital Democrats who voted overwhelmingly for Reagan, he found people who were embarrassed and didn't want to talk about having pulled the Republican lever...

...And the mass media have not only endowed Reagan with a mythic aura of communicativeness...

...24.95...

...But the graphics in The Masses have proven to be even more compelling—and more durable—than the words...

...For that, too, he is known as the Great Communicator...

...With few exceptions, they used the Freeze primarily to further their own political ambitions...

...Useful charts make for easy and informative reading, and the introduction places the issue of pesticide poisoning in proper context...

...He writes that even in the silent 1950s, there was memory: "It isn't that the gift of remembering was any richer then than it is now...

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

...But he also finds the offbeat people who refuse to conform and, like the author, go against the grain...

...279 pp...

...During the Depression, people who were homeless and down on their luck lived in shacks called Hoovervilles...

...It is probably the best American conservatism can come up with and, unfortunately, more rigorous than much of the rhetoric on the Left...

...picket signs read On Strike for Respect...

...Terkel recalls a phrase in vogue during World War II, shortly before the Normandy invasion: Situation Fluid...

...A media campaign gave Yale a black eye, and the solidarity of students, faculty, and alumni threatened the central mission of the university...

...408 pp...

...The first in the series, A Month of Sundays, focused on the hypocritical clergyman Arthur Dimmesdale...

...He doesn't disarm you...

...Who has concocted this outrageous example of Orwellian newspeak, depicting as a Great Communicator a public figure who is incapable by temperament, intellect, and political conviction of uttering anything but banalities and falsehoods about things that matter...

...Hester is Sarah Worth in Updike's version...

...Its educational activities lagged, as it took an accommoda-tionist, least-common-denominator approach to the issue, she says...

...Harvey O'Connor (who died only recently) was born into a militant working-class environment and tempered by early experience with the Industrial Workers of the World...

...As in his other recent books, Updike misses most of the opportunities afforded by his fine awareness of the relevance of Hawthorne for our times...

...And as devoted partners in causes that included labor organizing, free-speech fights, peace work, and resistance to the depredations of McCarthyism, they lived a model of constructive radicalism...

...Stone, and quotes him to telling effect on the matter of objectivity: "Every society has its dogmas, and a genuinely objective approach can break through them...

...Yet the seventy-six-year-old author himself, as beloved a fixture in Chicago as the Water Tower, still keeps up the dream of an undivided America...

...This is an extremely valuable insider's look at the Nuclear Freeze Campaign that swept the country in the early 1980s and then receded into the dull background of American politics...

...it is a sober and unsparing record of what went wrong...

...If doubts are raised in The Great Divide about the eventual direction of the country, they are not the author's doubts...

...He gave it a grand Great Society name—the Child Nutrition Act—and the mass media cheerfully went along with the gag...

...His proclivity for lying has earned him the sobriquet of Great Communicator...

...But the major difference between Hawthorne and Updike is that Hawthorne can acknowledge the real change in Hester...

...Government—and his editors—by challenging the official stereotypes in his reporting from Central America...

...After all, the Haymarket Affair took place in 1886, a good hundred years before I asked the impertinent question...

...In her last chapter, she spells out her hopes for an invigorated, more radical peace movement...

...When Reagan does utter a few words in public that haven't been carefully scripted for him by his White House retainers, he betrays abysmally muddled thinking, profound ignorance about current events, and a distinct confusion between experiences he has encountered in the real world and in the make-believe world of his Hollywood films...

...Ronald Reagan has held fewer Presidential press conferences than any other President since Franklin D. Roosevelt institutionalized the practice more than half a century ago...

...As Terkel sees and hears it, one of the problems is that many of the young people of the 1980s haven't a sense of history...

...His wife, Jessie Lloyd O'Connor, came from a sharply contrasting but surprisingly compatible background: She was an heiress to the Chicago Tribune fortune and the granddaughter of the patrician social reformer Henry Demarest Lloyd, who called himself a "socialist-anarchist-communist-individualist-collectivist-cooperative-aris-tocratic-democrat"—and might have mentioned being a pacifist, too...

...Amidst these ridiculous developments, Updike's occasional insights into American culture can't be taken very seriously...

...241 pp...

...they have depicted him as genial and humane, as avuncular and sentimental, as just plain American good folks, though he is a man who jokes about homelessness, scoffs at the privations of the poor, and believes unemployment is a hoax cooked up by "liberals...

...94 pp...

...Actually, since his mother was Armenian and his father Jewish, he is not technically a Jew...

...torn between two powerful instincts: they want to escape and at the same time they want to greet the male...

...But he explained that, contrary to the intention of the Puritans, Hester's "life had turned, in a great measure, from passion and feeling, to thought...

...Hertsgaard dedicates his book, appropriately, to "America's greatest modern newspaperman," I.F...

...What, then, of the vaunted "objectivity" of the press...

...But why, Terkel wonders, don't the homeless today call their street lives Reaganvilles...

...Women are just like "lady gray squirrels...

...But before you load up your next supermarket cart with fresh produce, you ought to read this little guidebook...

...19.95...

...their only virtue is obedience to their master's voice...

...More to the point, the mass media have celebrated his Administration's achievements in the realm of economic policy, though their impact has been to enrich the rich, immis-erate the poor, and roll up an unprecedented level of public debt...

...There emerges, to an alarming degree, a collective Alzheimer's disease...

...As lifelong American radicals whose activism spanned most decades of this century, they often found themselves making common cause with the Communist Party but never became slavish defenders of Soviet abuses or blind adherents to the party line...

...Updike's Sarah Worth is also a rebel, but while Hawthorne takes Hester's intellectual development seriously and defines accurately the psychological consequences, Updike soon loses sight of the philosophical and social issues and falls back on his habitual view of woman as a biologically determined creature...

...214 pp...

...selves...

...Despite obvious disagreements in vision and in tactics, the Freeze leadership never hashed out their differences and spoke in one voice...

...I hadn't the heart to ask them about life before the minimum wage—and that came about a good fifty years ago...

...Indeed, Arhat turns out to be Art Steinmetz, a "bright good Jewish boy" from Watertown, Massachusetts...

...But Art explains that in their arguments his parents were constantly "threatening each other with genocide...

...John Updike's 51...

...And the democratic participation of the women themselves kept up morale through the long haul...

...The voices are heard against a background of metastasized corruption in the corridors of power, from the Attorney General's office to the secret subgovernment known as Iran-contra and, therefore, to the White House itself...

...It is the rift of race that, at times, appears to close and then casually widens...

...Support from the maintenance and service workers who were in another local prevented Yale from splitting the work force...

...An Iowa farm wife said it was now impossible to find a neighbor who admitted voting for Reagan, yet she knew most of them did...

...His observations on the status of women and the role of the family are particularly smug and offensive...

...Though he surely has profound differences with the American Civil Liberties Union, he won't take cheap shots at you for being a "card-carrying member...

...they were truly people of the Left...

...It gave its artists freedom they could not find elsewhere, and for that reason they contributed their most exciting work to the magazine...

...Unlike Terkel's previous works of oral history, this book deals with the present: the Reagan-dominated 1980s...

...Of the many examples detailed in On Bended Knee, none illustrates this point better than the experience of Ray Bonner, a former New York Times reporter who ran afoul of the U.S...

...In Hawthorne's version of Calvinism, human beings are never whole but invariably splintered...

...29.95...

...Yesterday's headline is forgotten as a new one is emblazoned today...

...Environmental Protection Agency, as well as the Food and Drug Administration, have been negligent in protecting the American consumer...

...Investigative reporter Mark Hertsgaard has conducted a careful study of the mass media's performance in the eight years of the Reagan Presidency, and the resulting book is a damning indictment of the self-proclaimed watchdogs of American democracy...

...the second, Roger's Version, dealt with the demonic physician Roger Chillingworth, the cuckolded husband of Hester Prynne...

...a character of rich meanings, of complexities that connect him with the myths and powers of his country in an unprecedented way...

...The authors do a good job of describing the events and tactics of the union drive, and they express their hope that the victory at Yale will lead to more successes at other universities around the country...

...The unionizing drive was motivated as much by issues of dignity as by bread-and-butter concerns...

...The Federation of University Employees, an affiliate of the Hotel and Restaurant Employees International, used innovative tactics to overcome the vast resources of Yale and the union-busting law firm it hired from Chicago...

...Bon Appetit PESTICIDE ALERT: A Guide to Pesticides in Fruits and Vegetables by Lawrie Mott and Karen Snyder Sierra Club Books...

...Union Ivy THE YALE STRIKE of 1984-85 by Toni Gilpin, Gary Isaac, Dan Letwin, and Jack McKivigan Charles H. Kerr...

...Even in the same family, there are great divides...

...Is there any hope for the country that was fooled twice with the help of the press and television, that let Reagan do the old soft shoe, waving away responses in front of his getaway helicopter...

...Or read a cover story in Time magazine: "Ronald Reagan is a sort of masterpiece of American magic...

...Unlike the pompous million-dollar mouths on a television program such as 60 Minutes, who come across as more important than their subjects, Terkel doesn't cast himself in the role of investigative reporter...

...Drawn to Revolution ART FOR THE MASSES: A Radical Magazine and Its Graphics, 1911-1917 by Rebecca Zurier Temple University Press...

...Sarah finds it a touching insight, "the story of my life and all our lives really...

...End the story at the bottom of the page or within the two minutes prescribed on the evening news between the incessant commercials...

...by Herbert Mitgang Studs Terkel, who turned tape-recorded oral history into an art form, writes about the Reagan era in his latest work, The Great Divide: Second Thoughts on the American Dream...

...Sarah finds the perfect formulation in a zoology textbook which describes "the simultaneous eagerness of the female for sexual stimulation and her inherent fear of body contact with any other animal, including a male of her own species...

...Although Hester is tainted and can never be the agent of that change, Hawthorne notes that "the scarlet letter had not done its office...

...Everything is Reader's Digestible: wars, revolutions, governments, social theories...

...Drawing on his own unhappy experience, Bonner told Hertsgaard that no American correspondent "wants to go down as soft on communism...

...Of course, we hear the author's voice, too, in an introduction and between the conversations: "With Reagan's breaking of the air controllers' strike during his first year in office, to the thunderous applause of most Americans, including union members, things changed...

...Solo's remarkable account is free of acrimony and recrimination...

...not unrelated to having and not having...

...Hester gains an insight into the condition of woman and foresees a revolution in which "as a first step, the whole system of society is to be torn down and built up anew...

...It is the cleft that has cut us off, one from the other and indeed, from our very Herbert Mitgang is author of "Dangerous Dossiers: Exposing the Secret War Against America's Greatest Authors," and other books of American history...

...He comes across a file clerk who lets him know of her disdain for unions...

...Who'll criticize them...

...But most of the time objectivity is just the rationale for regurgitating the conventional wisdom of the day...

...Solo also shows the pitfalls of relying on elected officials to carry forward the Freeze's work...

...217 pp...

...This is a must-read for peace activists and all those interested in the grass-roots movement for progressive social change...

...As Leslie Fishbein notes in an informative introduction to this beautiful book, "The Masses was a magazine riddled with the most profound cultural as well as political contradictions...

...They put in eight hours a day...

...now own America's news organizations," Hertsgaard writes, and the interests they nurture and protect are no different from those of other profit-obsessed corporations...

...But Solo also cites leadership problems within the Freeze for contributing to its dissolution...

...Nobody holds back in the presence of Studs Terkel because he is a great conversationalist (one of the secrets of being a great interviewer...

...And they tell you whether washing, peeling, or cooking the produce will diminish the toxicity of the pesticides...

...In the midst of her absorption with Indian jargon (there are passages so dense even the glossary at the end of the book can't help to penetrate them) she sends off compulsive directions to her husband concerning the gardeners and comments about the stock market to her broker and her mother, while not neglecting to lay heavy guilt trips on her daughter Pearl, a conventional co-ed and ultimate dropout...

...The authors analyze the pesticides found on the top twenty-six fruits and vegetables—from apples and bananas to tomatoes and watermelons...

...Still, he is dubbed the Great Communicator...

...entry into World War I, The Masses published remarkable writing by the likes of Max Eastman, John Reed, Big Bill Haywood, Carl Sandburg, and other young socialists and anarchists who were convinced that making a revolution in America was not only possible but essential...

...News comes out like fast food in certain national journals and on the commercial networks: News McBites equal Big Macs, but hold the mustard...

...She points the way for overcoming some of the problems that beset the Freeze, and she lays out a new vision of "common security" based on nonviolence...

...It was a fundamental mistake to believe that Democrats were seriously committed to the movement's goals," she writes...

...That is the unreality behind the Reagan legacy...

...If what you're saying challenges the stereotypes of the day, it's hard to get it printed...

...29.95...

...He believes that's the way it is now: Progress is a definite maybe...

...In my prowlings and stalkings during these past three years," he writes, "I've come across individuals, surprising in number though diffident in demeanor (call them the gentle people, if you wish), who are challenging the doctrine of the official idea...

...In contrast, Hawthorne speaks effectively and eloquently in Hester's voice...

...5.95...

...the impression he conveys is that he is not trying to catch you or expose you...

...But they also provide useful advice for the consumer in the marketplace: Always wash your produce, beware of perfect-looking items (a dull bruised apple is likely to be healthier than a shiny blemish-free one), buy domestically grown produce, and pressure your supermarket manager to carry organically grown fruits and vegetables...

...259 pp...

...Drawing on about 175 interviews with journalists, news executives, and Administration officials, Hertsgaard offers sharp insights into the way American journalism—particularly the television networks, major news weeklies, and the national newspapers—goes about its business...

...She escapes to an ashram in Arizona run by a guru named Arhat...

...is the final volume of a trilogy based on Nathaniel Hawthorne's classic, The Scarlet Letter...

...you disarm yourself because you feel you are in the presence of a modest and intelligent mind...

...And though he values the role of symbols in sustaining social stability, he isn't likely to insist that you make a display of pledging allegiance to the flag...

...It appears that even our priorities have taken a necrophilic turn...

...Art for The Masses evokes an important era in American culture and American politics...

...Listen to CBS correspondent Leslie Stahl during the July 4, 1986, "Liberty Weekend" extravaganza: "Like his leading lady, the Statue of Liberty, the President, after six years in office, has himself become a symbol of pride in America...

...On Bended Knee is a portrait of lapdogs that don't even have the merit of being cute...

...22.50...

...but name me one reporter who's been called too soft on [U.S.-backed Chilean dictator Augusto] Pinochet, or [U.S.-backed Philippines dictator Ferdinand] Marcos...

...It is the breach that has cut off past from present...