BOOKS

...Our own daughter's been working as a waitress, must I remind you...

...Justice Department...

...This past seems to come to us unmodified, in an almost Proustian way, as if it were currently happening...

...Young is too experienced and knowledgeable to blame everything on the United States, but he does argue that a more determined and serious effort by the Reagan Administration could have brought us far closer to a settlement that would recognize the just concerns of both Palestinian and Israelis...

...Anne Tyler won the National Book Critics Circle Award for her tenth novel, The Accidental Tourist...

...The accident disorients him and fills him with self-doubt, but he ultimately returns to his roots...

...Middle East Policy, 1961-1985 by Ronald J. Young American Friends Service Committee...

...9.95 paperback...

...Their lawyers stalled, but in the winter of 1988 a former police colonel and an intelligence agent were tried on murder charges...

...14.95...

...In November 1980, Romero Barcelo squeaked through to a second term for governor by 3,037 votes over former Governor Rafael Hernandez Colon of the Popular Democratic Party (PDP), but the PDP won both houses of the Puerto Rican legislature...

...In the same period, the United States contributed to the increased militarization of the region through massive arms transfers and direct military intervention in Lebanon...

...And he doesn't pull his punches...

...It's a perfectly respectable occupation...

...Young is most careful—perhaps too careful—not to criticize Israel...

...In fact, it would be interesting to know more of Rolland's turbulent inner life during the years of political upheaval...

...As a seasoned reporter, Suarez smelled something wrong with the police story of a "shootout" at Cerro Maravilla—a shootout then-Governor Carlos Romero Bar-celo described as a "heroic" police action— and went to work with Stella digging up evidence of police malfeasance...

...Now out in paperback, Randy Shilts's unsparing account of the AIDS epidemic demands a mass readership...

...Young's own perspective, forcefully articulated by the AFSC for a number of years, is that a just Middle East peace requires the recognition of the national rights of both Palestinian Arabs and Israeli Jews, and that negotiations between the representatives of both peoples, and not military conflicts, are the best means of resolving their differences...

...Wendell Berry, poet, essayist, farmer, returns in this novel to the themes that he has made his own: a closeness to the land, a respect for "old-fashioned" farming, and a sense of community—or "membership," as he calls it...

...Roughly one sixth of the labor force is jobless...

...The value of this study is that it begins where most others leave off: Nelson's primary concern is neither with the Haymarket victims (the martyrs of the title) nor with the well-known leaders of militant labor...

...President Carter in 1980 faced a serious challenge from Senator Edward Kennedy for the Democratic Presidential nomination, and Romero Barcelo could use his gubernatorial leverage to deliver a bloc of Democratic votes to Carter at the Democratic convention...

...citizenship, albeit second-class, are simply colonial ornaments...

...Both of these burials turn about the unexpected, the peculiar responses of their protagonists...

...378 pp...

...soil, as Suarez so vividly shows...

...18.95 hardcover...

...After all, the guilt or innocence of Bartolo-meo Vanzetti and Nicola Sacco, the immigrant anarchists put to death in 1927, has been the topic of passionate letters to The New York Times within the last few weeks...

...A funeral is the centerpiece of Anne Tyler's Breathing Lessons...

...The Governor, caught in a furor, ordered Puerto Rico's Justice Department to investigate...

...The book also testifies to the enduring significance of the case, with contemporary art by Sue Coe and Dennis Adams, among many others, and words by Margaret Randall, E.L...

...The often madcap journey may have a near-equivalent in the unlikely automobile expedition between Jefferson, Mississippi, and Memphis, Tennessee, in Faulkner's The Reivers...

...economic interests, and an underestimation of the power of ordinary people to effect political change...

...policy toward the Middle East is somehow different from U.S...

...I suspect most editors have greeted news stories about this case with a yawn...

...Fortunately, there were two reporters, Tomas Stella and Manuel Suarez, and one editor, Andrew Viglucci, all of the English-language San Juan Star, who did not yawn...

...It deserves to be understood by a new generation of activists...

...It points out the criminal negligence on the part of the Reagan Administration, and particularly the National Institutes of Health, for not devoting sufficient resources early on to curb the epidemic...

...15 paper...

...Oh, great, Maggie...

...The outcome was the same—the colonel was acquitted, the underling convicted...

...Yet her handling of point of view and her feel for dialogue make one think that the transfer from one medium to the other would be within her grasp...

...160 pp...

...And Berry tends to objectify women as objects of worship or beauty or corporate success...

...32.95 Few Americans today know the work of Romain Rolland, though he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1915 and his BOOKS BRIEFLY monumental novel Jean-Christophe, based loosely on the life of Beethoven, is one of the masterpieces of the Twentieth Century...

...occupation" of the island...

...But Fisher excels at exploring the intellectual and moral questions which, to a remarkable degree, are still relevant in our very different time and place...

...Fisher, a psychoanalyst as well as a historian, is admirably restrained in applying the first of those disciplines to his subject...

...Perhaps the most important contribution Young makes is his persuasive argument that the defects of U.S...

...It is advice to which the leaders of the next Administration—and those of us who hope to influence them—need to listen...

...island like Puerto Rico...

...Breathing Lessons, like Seize the Day, is one of those novels that take place in a single day and yet manage to flesh out a lifetime...

...He is meticulously fair throughout the book and at the same time tells of the pressures (primarily from Romero Barcelo and his NPP henchmen) to which he and Stella were subjected...

...and in February 1987, the families of the two young men murdered at Cerro Maravilla signed agreements with the Commonwealth under which each family would receive $575,000 to settle their lawsuits against the Government...

...While such a position has been, to a major degree, the international consensus for more than a decade, the United States has established itself as the primary mediator in the dispute while at the same time refusing either to recognize the Palestinians' right to statehood or to negotiate with the Palestine Liberation Organization...

...18.95...

...The Feds eased up and Romero Barcelo delivered twenty-one of Puerto Rico's forty-one votes to Carter at the convention...

...The difference between Puerto Rico and the rest of Latin America is that justice, tardy and incomplete though it was, came to Puerto Rico, thanks largely to the press and especially The San Juan Star...

...I am reminded of Ohio's Kent State massacre as somewhat analogous to the killings of two young men, Carlos Enrique Soto Ar-riyi and Arnaldo Dario Rosado, on Cerro Maravilla, which is "marvelous mountain" in English...

...Puerto Rico has been a U.S.-flag territory for eighty-nine years and Puerto Ricans have been U.S...

...citizens...

...Maybe, through Suarez's book, mainland Americans will start paying a little more attention to their Caribbean outpost and its second-class U.S...

...On January 9, 1981, the U.S...

...The novel contains a few great scenes, including one in which Catlett addresses a Conference on the Future of the American Food System, telling off the academics, economists, and bureaucrats who are gleefully destroying the family farm...

...Some of the art verges on hagiography—it is useful to remember that one need not be a saint to be a martyr—but most of it is powerful and all of it reminds us that it happened here and can happen again...

...Shilts, in a remarkable feat of investigative reporting, tracks down the first victims of AIDS, recounts the alarm of health workers at the Centers for Disease Control, airs the heroic efforts of a few physicians who saw the dangers early on and tried to warn the nation...

...Doctorow, and Adrienne Rich...

...And now, more than ten years after these political murders, Manny Suarez has written a detailed account of the killings and their coverup...

...A hopeful aspect of Young's argument, based on scores of interviews with representatives of both sides as well as a thorough survey of the media, is that there are influential elements among both Israelis and Palestinians—particularly the latter— who have substantially moderated their positions over the years toward accepting a two-state solution...

...But six weeks later the PDP-controlled Puerto Rican Senate adopted a resolution ordering its judiciary committee to investigate Cerro Maravilla, and in early April a former assistant district attorney, Hector Rivera Cruz, was named Senate investigator...

...The resident commissioner has no vote on the floor of the House of Representatives...

...Finally, in late 1985, Puerto Rican Commonwealth murder charges were filed against the police...

...Each of our "great" wars, it seems, is followed by a period of intense reaction and savage repression—an attempt to strangle in its cradle any incipient movement to forge a new postwar society...

...124 pp...

...He apportions it to many guilty parties, including the media, gay-bathhouse owners, and some leaders of the gay community itself, who for political reasons did not want to own up to the dangers of AIDS until it was too late...

...Ira carries a deck of cards which he pulls out at inopportune moments to engage in a "form of solitaire...

...flag and U.S...

...As Ira once characterized her, "Maggie always had to be inviting other people into their lives...

...DuBois...

...Albert Camus's The Stranger begins with a funeral...

...Breathing Lessons, her eleventh, shows a further refinement of her talents...

...he "had made common cause with a technical power that proposed no limit to itself, that was, in fact, destroying [him], as it had already destroyed nearly all that was natural or human around him...

...Puerto Rico's per-capita income last year was just a trifle higher than Taiwan's...

...There are other related family groups in the novel, with Ira's father and two sisters, Junie and Dome, forming a memorable unit...

...He worked at The New York Post (in its pre-Murdoch days), fell in love with and married a Puerto Rican woman, visited Puerto Rico and liked it so much that he and his wife decided to move there...

...Camus's Meursault callously fails to cry at the funeral of his mother, while Bellow's Tommy Wilhelm inexplicably cries during the last rites for a person he has never seen before...

...I was merely stating the facts, Ira...

...The colonel was acquitted on all counts, the agent was convicted of second-degree murder...

...Catlett quits his job and returns with his wife to Port William, Kentucky, where he grew up...

...They wanted to blow up a Cerro Mara villa television tower as a protest against what they considered continued U.S...

...The protagonist is Andy Cat-lett, a former journalist for Scientific Farming, who has an epiphany when he is assigned to do a profile on a "premier farmer...

...Her characters live in a society dominated by popular song and middlebrow culture...

...The first quarter of Suarez's book is essential for understanding how Gonzalez Malave lured the two young independen-tistas to the mountaintop and their deaths...

...It not only educates, it enrages...

...378 pp...

...policy to change, there must be wider public awareness of the American role in the conflict, as well as greater willingness to challenge the ugly stereotypes many Americans have toward Israelis and Arabs and toward Judaism and Islam...

...But the police entrapment, beatings, and cold-blooded assassinations of these two independentistas took place in the highlands of Puerto Rico, where 3.3 million residents live on a Caribbean island half the size of New Jersey...

...Everyone knows that "death squads" are a fact of life in these Third World nations, so why not in a similarly situated Hispanic William Steif is a former national and foreign correspondent for the Scripps-Howard newspapers...

...That, it seems to me, is the rationale for the lack of newspaper and television coverage of the Cerro Maravilla killings in mainland America...

...The United States is "supporting" Israel, Young argues, as it "supported" South Vietnam and is "supporting" El Salvador—a policy that, in the name of defending a country, may lead to its ultimate destruction...

...Maggie is the self-appointed protector of the family's fortunes and integrity as she tries against unlikely odds to bring her former daughter-in-law back into the fold...

...Long before Jean-Paul Sartre confronted (without ever fully resolving) the challenges of political commitment, Rolland put himself on the front lines of energetic activism...

...A Day, a Life BREATHING LESSONS by Anne Tyler Knopf...

...The tit for tat was that Carter would ease up on the Federal Cerro Maravilla inquiries...

...they were, in effect, the first casualties of the Cold War...

...The Justice Department, predictably, whitewashed the police, saying the dozen cops atop the mountain fired in self-defense...

...But a death squad operated on U.S...

...The day of the funeral is made to fit into a lifetime of eccentric moments, "with the knobby, fumbling way she seemed to be progressing through her life...

...With the Palestinian uprising reviving American diplomatic initiatives in the Middle East, the importance of this recent study of U.S...

...Cold War Casualties THE ROSENBERGS: Collected Visions of Artists and Writers Edited by Rob A. Okun University Books...

...Melvin J. Friedman (Melvin J. Friedman is a professor of comparative literature at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee...

...I am not aware that Anne Tyler has ever written for the stage...

...Returning from the assignment, Catlett happens upon an Amish farmer who shows him the good old ways...

...They would exemplify the un-American menace, the subversive conspiracy that had to be rooted out...

...The net result has been to reinforce the power and influence of hard-liners on both sides...

...Like much of American history, this fascinating period has been effectively suppressed...

...Suarez writes clean, simple prose that makes this complex story, with its dozens of characters, understandable...

...In fact, Young says, both Arabs and Israelis complain that the United States has no real Middle East policy, but simply a series of ad-hoc reactions based on a grossly overstated perception of an imminent Soviet threat in the region...

...Thus she tries to annex every casual stranger she comes upon—a waitress, a certain Mr...

...policy elsewhere—a concern that has been all the more obvious this election year, when Democrats challenged Reagan Administration policy in Central America, Southern Africa, and almost everywhere except the Middle East...

...Now, there is nothing wrong with being a waitress," she told him...

...Dancing Anarchists BEYOND THE MARTYRS: A Social History of Chicago's Anarchists, 1870-1900 by Bruce C. Nelson Rutgers University Press...

...Many critics of Tyler's work have pointed to the essential presence of families in her fiction...

...citizens for more than sixty years, but they are second-class citizens, with no Presidential vote and representation only by a "resident commissioner" in Congress...

...policy toward the Arab-Israeli conflict, appropriate for both scholars and those whose familiarity with the situation is limited...

...Nelson, who has taught history at Northern Illinois University, renders a fine service with this account of the three decades at the end of the Nineteenth Century when anarchists, socialists, and kindred radicals of similar persuasions were prominent in Chicago's labor movement...

...Young argues that in order for U.S...

...The two young men were not angels...

...Hernandez Colon, whose PDP wants to retain Puerto Rico's Commonwealth (or territorial) status and perhaps seek greater autonomy, defeated Romero Barcelo for the governorship in the November 1984 election, and that seemed to bury Romero Barcelo politically...

...The U.S...

...Justice Department terminated its investigation, saying it had found no grounds to prosecute...

...Government cast them...

...The Rosenbergs in particular—New Yorkers, Jews, communists—were made to order for the role in which the U.S...

...policy...

...What is beyond dispute, or ought to be, is that the Rosenbergs, like Sacco and Vanzetti, fell victims to a political process in which considerations of justice (or of guilt and innocence) played no significant role...

...another of your logical progressions...

...The Rosenbergs: Collected Visions of Artists and Writers, like the traveling exhibit on which it is based, recalls the immense impact the case had at the time: The book contains graphics and writings by Pablo Picasso and Fernand Leger, Rockwell Kent and Alice Neel, Louis Ar-agon, Arthur Miller, and W.E.B...

...The rest of the book is devoted to the slow, painful process of digging out the truth...

...In the fall of 1988 the same two men were tried for perjury...

...His focus is on the rank and file, their ethnic and ideological allegiances, and the legacy they passed on to the generations that succeeded them...

...While the present time of Breathing Lessons occupies only a Saturday, much of the novel recreates extended periods of Maggie's and Ira's past...

...A familiar world thus comes across as slightly off-center, or as Maggie would have it, "the tiniest bit out of focus, the colors not quite within the lines...

...Saul Bellow's Seize the Day ends with one...

...That arguments should still rage about the guilt or innocence of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the "atom spies" executed thirty-five years ago, should surprise no one...

...That farmer, it turns out, has completely mechanized his operations, has sunk himself into debt in the process, and has developed an ulcer to boot...

...305 pp...

...Unfortunately, there is a naive assumption in this country that U.S...

...so involved it could last for hours...

...And many—far too many-mainland Americans tend to look down on Puerto Ricans, whether on the island or in such urban centers as New York and Chicago...

...Stephen Zunes (Stephen Zunes is a doctoral candidate at Cornell University and an assistant professor in the Department of Politics at Ithaca College...

...182 pp...

...He wrote "Murder on the Mountaintop" in the April 1984 issue of The Progressive...

...The automobile the Morans drive seems curiously accident-prone, like Tyler's characters...

...27.50...

...They also formed singing societies and theater groups, marched in community processions, and enjoyed a vibrant cultural life...

...There were no Pulitzer Prizes in this for Suarez, Stella, Viglucci, or The Star, but they did the right thing...

...Though Puerto Rico has no Presidential vote, it sends rather large delegations to both the Democratic and Republican conventions...

...Who asked for the facts, Maggie...

...In this novel the oddity of reproducing the circumstances of a wedding at a "memorial service"—the same people are in place performing the same musical functions—seems suggestive of the rhythm of the entire work...

...Breathing Lessons features the Morans (wife Maggie, husband Ira, daughter Daisy, son Jesse, former daughter-in-law Fiona, and granddaughter Leroy...

...Why do you feel the need to pour out your soul to some waitress...

...On March 27, 1985, the ten cops were found guilty of forty-five of the fifty-three perjury charges...

...foreign policy everywhere else: a tendency to see regional conflicts from a rigidly East-West perspective, an overemphasis on arms and military force over diplomacy, an obsession with narrowly defined U.S...

...Still, his impassioned commitment to the family farm and his dithyrambic prose mark this as a book worth reading...

...Government Coverup by Manuel Suarez Waterfront Press (52 Maple Avenue, Maplewood, NJ 07040...

...12.95 paper...

...8.95 paperback...

...There he rediscovers himself and returns to farming, only to lose his right hand in a corn picker...

...The Morans are not frequenters of the Walters Art Gallery, the Baltimore Museum of Art, or the Peabody Conservatory...

...j The mainland feeling is that Puerto Rico is at the edge of the Third World, a kind of intermediate stop before the plunge into such Third World countries as El Salvador, Nicaragua, Colombia, Bolivia, or Peru...

...37 hardcover...

...Ronald Young, who worked for three years with his wife Carol Jensen as Middle East representatives of the American Friends Service Committee, has written a readable analysis of recent U.S...

...I found Suarez's descriptions of the painstaking digging done by him and his fellow reporters—some on San Juan's Spanish-language papers—fascinating...

...In the later 1970s there was a somewhat justified fear of independentista terrorism on the island, and Romero Barcelo and his top aides in the statehood-oriented New Progressive Party (NPP) played on this fear...

...The majority of Puerto Ricans speak Spanish...

...Tyler traces the eccentric movements of Maggie and Ira Moran, as well as their automobile, from Baltimore to Deer Lick, Pennsylvania, and their circuitous return—all on a Saturday...

...But Shilts does not place all the blame on the Reagan Administration...

...policy in the region becomes all the more obvious...

...He sees the Israelis, like the Palestinians and other Arabs, as victims of a misguided policy which ultimately serves nobody's interest...

...Gabriel in the nursing home where she works, an aged black man named Otis—and expand the contours of the family structure...

...Maggie's pantyhose acts up in odd ways, forcing her "to take shortened, unnaturally level steps like a chunky little wind-up toy wheeling along the sidewalk...

...However, this encouraging trend is counterbalanced by what many Israelis and Palestinians see as an increasing tendency for strategic considerations to have much more influence than moral concerns in the formation of U.S...

...What he and Stella discovered in years of digging was that the police had set up the two young men who sought independence for Puerto Rico...

...Thinking and Acting ROMAIN ROLLAND AND THE POLITICS OF INTELLECTUAL ENGAGEMENT by David James Fisher University of California Press...

...The police used an undercover agent, Alejandro Gonzalez Malave, who led the pair into the mountaintop trap...

...the Cerro Maravilla stain clings to him...

...by William Steif If what happened on July 25, 1978, atop Puerto Rico's 4,600-foot-high Cerro Maravilla had happened somewhere in mainland America—say Madison, Wisconsin, or Maplewood, New Jersey, where this book was published—there would have been a huge outcry, much revulsion, probably a Congressional investigation...

...640 pp...

...They had participated in previous violent protests, most of which had aborted because of incompetence...

...Anyone familiar with the Baltimore scene will recognize the landmarks of the Morans' world: Hutzler's department store, Harborplace (which Ira considers "un-Baltimorean"), and Pimlico Race Track...

...Return to the Land REMEMBERING by Wendell Berry North Point Press...

...For much of the world, however, they became the first significant symbol of American might put to monstrous use...

...As early as four days after the killings, The Star published a report that the driver of the hijacked taxi, who was taken by Gonzalez Malave and the two independentistas to Cerro Maravilla, saw the two young men alive after they had been captured...

...It is surprising to discover," writes Bruce Nelson in Beyond the Martyrs, "that the supposedly unwashed, wild-eyed, bomb-throwing anarchists held family picnics and went to dances...

...He tried a comeback in the Puerto Rican Senate as a prelude to another run as the NPP's gubernatorial candidate in 1988, but he didn't make it...

...Young describes five episodes between 1981 and 1986 when progress toward direct Israeli-Palestinian negotiations and movement toward some sort of mutual recognition collapsed because of the failure of the United States to sustain pressure or even demonstrate interest in a peace settlement...

...This was the first of a series of whitewashes by both the Puerto Rican Commonwealth's Justice Department and the U.S...

...Individual sentences ranged from six to thirty years in prison...

...He found a reporting job with El Mundo, in 1960 the island's most prestigious newspaper...

...327 pp...

...As Shilts ably demonstrates, the Administration had ample opportunity to attack the disease but sat on its hands—in part because of bigotry against gays, in part because of bureaucratic stinginess...

...This is perhaps the most important book of the decade...

...Writing in the manner of detective fiction, Shilts weaves together all of the important people and institutions that played a part in the epidemic of AIDS...

...One can imagine an exchange like the following being moved from page to stage: "Well, who brought it up, I'd like to know...

...BOOKS BRIEFLY The Real AIDS Scandal AND THE BAND PLAYED ON: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic by Randy Shilts Penguin Books...

...The reason soon becomes apparent...

...policy in the Middle East are typical of the defects of U.S...

...In the 1960s he studied at Columbia University's School of Journalism, returned to San Juan, and in 1968 shifted to the Scripps-Howard-owned San Juan Star...

...Two last fillips to the case: The undercover agent, Gonzalez Malave, was shot and killed by unknown assassins while visiting his parents in suburban San Juan...

...Tyler is highly effective in the way she allows the present to melt into the past, blurring any crucial distinctions between the two...

...Suarez, now in his middle fifties, was born in New York of Spanish-Mexican parentage, spent a few years in Spain as a child, was educated in New York public schools, served in the U.S...

...Indeed, the FBI comes out qf this case looking particularly sleazy...

...With Rivera Cruz in charge, the whole case was slowly re-investigated from the start and by mid-1983 the Senate hearings went on public television, where they created a sensation...

...Army during the Korean war, and graduated from Long Island University...

...By late 1983, Romero Barcelo was backing away from support of his police, and in February 1984, ten of the Cerro Maravilla cops were charged with fifty-three counts of perjury committed before Federal grand juries investigating the case...

...To mainland America, all this may seem to be just more Latin politics, of only peripheral interest to newspaper readers and television watchers in Minneapolis, North Platte, or Richmond...

...He was an early biographer and devoted adherent of Mohandas Gandhi, helping to popularize pacifism in the wake of the carnage of World War I. With the Nazis' advent to power in Germany, he became an outspoken antifascist and, in the process, an apologist for Soviet Stalinism...

...But the narrative, unfortunately, is at times difficult to follow, with many flashbacks and an improbable setting in San Francisco...

...The driver, a Puerto Rican jibara (peasant) from Ponce, became a key figure, pressured over and over by police...

...It is particularly valuable at this time because it raises serious questions as to whether the United States is actually serious about achieving a fair and equitable peace settlement...

...But David James Fisher presents us not with Rolland the gifted and profoundly influential writer but with Rolland the quintessential European intellectual wrestling with the problem of political engagement...

...A Just Peace MISSED OPPORTUNITIES FOR PEACE: U.S...