BOOKS
Weinberg, Arthur
BOOKS Maverick on the Court THE DOUGLAS LETTERS: Selections from the Private Papers of Justice William O. Douglas edited with an introduction by Melvin I. Urofsky Adler & Adler. 448 pp....
...to his writings as a husband, father, and friend...
...The first three of his four marriages ended in divorce, and his relations with his two children were poor...
...Why she endured him is never made clear...
...Baez writes bitterly of singer Bob Dylan, with enough evidence to make a case that he was a narcissist for most of their stormy union...
...blacks and whites and Haitians than on the results of U.S...
...Supreme Court...
...When she's not having an affair she's looking for one...
...Beloved is finally dissolved and Sethe absolved, freed at last from her terrible longing and guilt...
...Douglas wrote to him: "Let me backstop...
...President John F. Kennedy is still the "second most hated man" among the Cubans...
...But now she'd gone wild, due to the mishandling of the nephew, telling him to think—just think—what would his own horse do if you beat it beyond the point of education...
...238 pp...
...She believes that the policies of the last six Administrations reflect a dismal record of deceit...
...part of the fabric of American society...
...No conspiracy, she thinks: "The confrontation was preventable, and yet...
...Now, in a second edition just published, 50,000 new words have been added...
...That screen idols age is no surprise to anyone, and the chapter could have been better used than to eulogize an aging legend...
...The Cuban exile community makes up 56 per cent of Miami's population and 43 per cent of Dade County's...
...Controversy will always breed extremists...
...24.95...
...I can't help but be a little envious knowing that the glue that held the young of the 1960s has dried and flaked off two decades later...
...Eight years after the fact, it remains astonishing that a group of American Nazis and Ku Klux Klansmen thought they could get away with an armed assault on anti-Klan demonstrators in the middle of Greensboro, North Carolina, in broad daylight, with television cameras rolling...
...The most human parts of the book are his letters to his children, which depict a parent trying to be supportive, encouraging independence, yet sending money and advice...
...She sang in Hanoi during Christmas 1972, when American pilots assaulted the city with the worst bombings since World War II...
...The letters reflect almost all aspects of Douglas's adult life, from his years on the law faculties at Columbia and Yale and then the Securities and Exchange Commission to his appointment to the Supreme Court...
...She finds missed signals, noncommunication, and a legacy of racism that allowed police to take less than seriously their mission to safeguard the black neighborhood in which the demonstration was held...
...receiving substantial sums of money from a foundation whose benefactor had significant interests in gambling casinos...
...to the impeachment campaign against him...
...policies in Central America and the Caribbean...
...Baez, seeming self-conscious about her "Virgin Mary" image, is quick to point out her own teeming sexuality...
...Slavery's Toll BELOVED by Toni Morrison Alfred A. Knopf...
...18.95...
...2,478 pp...
...Come and see this old Madonna, who will tenderly serve you jasmine tea and say quietly in response to your unformed questions struggling up from the ashes of your fiery young life, 'I understand, sweetie, I understand.' But for now, in the diamond glow of your success, dance and sing and bump and grind in your jangling glitz necklaces and skintight mini bun-huggers...
...19.95...
...Douglas retired from the Supreme Court during President Ford's Administration...
...Madonna, then a sensation, followed in the afterglow of Baez's performance of "We Are the World...
...The difference between us is not in social values but in ways and means," Douglas wrote to Frankfurter...
...328 pp...
...Ask anyone my age about the 1960s and chances are one of these images will be mentioned...
...The ghost that haunts this powerful, painful novel is surely meant to haunt all Americans, particularly affluent white Americans who are the book's likeliest purchasers...
...They killed five people, maimed several others, and they did get away with it...
...The three (now four—because she'd had the one coming when she cut) pick-aninnees they had hoped were alive and well enough to take back to Kentucky, take back and raise properly to do the work Sweet Home desperately needed, were not...
...Joan Baez, now forty-six, used her music to champion the issues of nonviolence and human rights long before any of my generation could utter our first words...
...But don't leave me out completely...
...the hermetic tension of Sethe's life with Denver, the daughter who survived...
...The only way to obtain an appointment to the Court, he wrote, was to "stay in the stream of history, be in the forefront of events...
...Cornucopia THE RANDOM HOUSE DICTIONARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE Random House...
...it presents forcefully his dislikes, his causes, and his adamant belief in the Bill of Rights...
...24.95...
...A laconic, elliptical, and haunting book...
...They had a cohesive passion that swept American politics off its mired feet...
...Her compassion is strong and unsentimental...
...The President's tribute to the retiring justice differed markedly from his earlier attacks: "Future generations of citizens will continue to benefit from your firm devotion to the fundamental rights of individual freedom and privacy under the Constitution...
...Writer Joan Didion focuses less on the interaction of Cubans with U.S...
...Controversial both in lifestyle and in opinion, Douglas became the libertarian conscience of the Court., That is what William O. Douglas was all about...
...They mark indeed the differences between freedom and the great abyss...
...These letters, whether written to friends, family, foes, or brethren, remain a strong cry for individual rights and liberty...
...Any boy who is any good has that spark in him when he is about Ty's age," he wrote...
...The "tree" beaten into Sethe's back...
...Of King's death, Baez writes, "Every time I hear your voice it brings me back to the foot of the mountain...
...But beneath the surface coolness of passages like the following there see.hes a fathomless fury: "Right off it was clear, to schoolteacher especially, that there was nothing there to claim...
...It was the fall of 1966, and the black civil-rights leader stole an exhausted slumber at a home before preaching to his flock in Grenada, Mississippi...
...The singer devotes a bizarre chapter to Marlon Brando...
...No grounds for impeachment were found...
...frustrated extremists will often turn to violence...
...a man with his eyes closed and a gun poised at his temple...
...And well it should...
...It is a ghost we cannot ignore, just as Toni Morrison's escaped slave Sethe cannot ignore the ghost of the infant daughter whose throat she cut to save her from the white men...
...I would call you conservative...
...The obscene brutality of slavery—whether kindly or cruelly administered—still poisons economic and social relations between blacks and whites today and no doubt will far into the future...
...Iam twenty-four, two years out of college, and part of a generation our elders like to call "children of the 1980s...
...This new edition is a cornucopia of information, conveniently accessible...
...Millions watched the television newscast of King and Baez that same year in Grenada as they walked in front of a line of black school children denied admission to an all-white school...
...What is to be savored most, however, is her account of the pacifists who influenced her tireless efforts toward nonviolence and civil rights...
...She aligned herself with other pacifist mentors: Martin Luther King Jr., Ira Snadperl, Lech Walesa, Ginetta Sagan, and Thomas Merton...
...Their difficulty also stemmed from the refusal of the widows and other survivors to cooperate with the prosecution...
...Amy Simmons (Amy Simmons is a free-lance writer based in Washington, D.C...
...It's music for the 1980s...
...There is a compact new atlas in vivid color...
...She sang to the mothers of the disappeared in Argentina...
...Morrison reveals richness and depth in these bold, beaten, bone-weary survivors, these tattered remnants of a people torn ?oart by slavery...
...For nearly twenty years, the original, unabridged Random House dictionary has been the final arbiter on spelling and usage for the editorial staff of The Progressive...
...Unlike Bork, Douglas faced a sympathetic Congress...
...Sethe is a singular ' oman whose passions and pains (and rare pleasures) become as real for the reader as Beloved's ghost becomes for Sethe...
...It was a fruitless effort to construct a bridge on which the "feelgood" brood can hear the echoes of a lost generation...
...Little Havana MIAMI by Joan Didion Simon and Schuster...
...All he had to do was say 'non-VAH-olence' and I'd turn into one of his folk...
...Charged by the U.S...
...inevitable...
...They had the music...
...It was an isolated incident, and yet...
...Singing for Peace AND A VOICE TO SING WITH by Joan Baez Summit Books...
...Perhaps you'll get married (I hope you do soon...
...The only dangerous people in the world are those who are rebels without a cause, and the problem is as the years go by to find a good cause to which Ty can tie his rebellion...
...To his daughter he rejoiced that her son was turning out to be a rebel...
...A chilling story, compellingly told...
...At times there is also an intrusion of phrases which seem incongruously elegant ("tableau," "prima donna," "company of her peers") or anachronistic ("running interference," "changing gears") in a novel taking place in the 1860s and 1870s and written largely in the vernacular of Sethe's world...
...Today's Cuban community is one of increasing affluence and influence...
...275 pp...
...Baez's politics are rooted in her Quaker upbringing...
...her father, a research physicist, refused profitable work from the military...
...And when there was no song there was her work with Amnesty International and her own Hu-manitas, an international human-rights organization...
...A chapter is devoted to Justice Felix Frankfurter and another to "the Brethren" of the Court...
...He remained a member of the Court for thirty-six years, the longest tenure of any Supreme Court justice up to then or since...
...And a Voice to Sing With lends itself to satisfying our sweet tooth for naughty tidbits...
...Sethe's life of self-protective isolation and "rememories" of past terrors is conveyed in earthy colloquialisms and pithy phrases that eventually flesh out her story much as the ghost of her slain daughter Beloved is given form and flesh after years of haunting Sethe's house—shattering mirrors, dumping kettles, frightening away the two brothers Sethe had also tried to rescue (by killing) from the Sweet Home slaveholders, who tracked Sethe from Kentucky to Cincinnati to recapture her and her brood...
...She sang to Solidarity members in a Polish church...
...In 1939, when Douglas was appointed, most of the country was sympathetic to the Roosevelt Administration, and Douglas was a Roosevelt loyalist...
...I never grow weary of those chaotic film clips depicting Woodstock...
...In a reflective mood, Baez asks, "What will happen to you, baby child, when the spotlights dim and the morning sunlight finds your eyes red from weeping...
...Be on your own so far as you can...
...Our memory of Vietnam is a cloudy collection of photographs: the young Vietnamese girl, nude but for a stinging coat of napalm, running down a smoke-filled street...
...Justice Department with conspiracy under the civil-rights laws, they were acquitted on all counts...
...the arousal of deadened feelings under Paul D's touch...
...But as the rhythm accelerates and the plot penetrates, these small stylistic lapses seem irrelevant...
...You would call me impractical and too idealistic...
...It's just that in the 1980s I can't seem to find where the path begins...
...Baez's portrait of King in And a Voice to Sing With is both funny and poignant...
...the growing obsession with making amends to Beloved...
...I don't lack the courage, Martin...
...They team-teach social history at DePaul University in Chicago...
...Sethe's past is pieced together through fragments and flashbacks...
...Other liaisons are more understandable, such as her brief lesbian affair with a young admirer...
...perhaps you'll want to come home for Christmas...
...her devotion to Baby Suggs, the bought-free mother-in-law in whose house Sethe found refuge and whose great heart finally broke...
...17.95...
...Toni Morrison does not let us off the hook...
...working for the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions and participating in various "leftist" events, and writing the book Points of Rebellion, which Ford and others considered to be un-American and inflammatory...
...While this fragmentation is perhaps the most effective way such a nightmare of battered lives and passionate loves and hates could be ladled out without drowning the reader, it is at first difficult to make sense of some of Morrison's disjointed sentences and sequences...
...Supreme Court, what would have been the reaction if the situation had been reversed and the liberal Douglas, or someone like him, were the nominee today...
...by Arthur Weinberg As I read The Douglas Letters, a recurring thought occupied me: In light of the turmoil that surrounded the nomination of the conservative Judge Robert Bork to the U.S...
...When Gerald Ford was a U.S...
...Most readers don't look for answers in an autobiography...
...But how will this ghost laid on us ever really be put to rest...
...Typical is a letter to his son, Bill, who wanted to be on his own in graduate school and turned down money from his father...
...The prosecutors' difficulty, in simple terms, arose from the fact that the dead people were members of the Communist Workers Party and too many of those involved—from law-enforcement officials to jurors—apparently believed that it is not really a crime to kill a communist...
...Up until the age of twelve I thought Woodstock was a rather odd-looking bird in a Charles Schulz comic strip...
...the full horror of all she has suffered and done overwhelms only by degrees...
...He was appointed to the Supreme Court after President Roosevelt's unsuccessful attempt to pack the Court in the early New Deal days...
...79.95...
...She announced, "Children of the 1980s, this is your Woodstock...
...Ann Morrissett Davidon (Ann Morrissett Davidon is a free-lance writer and critic...
...Two were lying open-eyed in sawdust...
...the pride, joy, rage—all these are not the stereotypical features of a morality-tale mammy...
...You can find definitions of formerly nonexistent words such as "hype," computer-software lingo, and Wall Street terminology...
...Baez is generous, almost to a fault, with the inside story...
...BOOKS BRIEFLY The Third off November CODENAME GREENKIL: The 1979 Greensboro Killings by Elizabeth Wheaton University of Georgia Press...
...Baez was ushered in by King's aides to wake him with one of her famous sopranic melodies...
...Charged by the state with first-degree murder and felony riot, the killers were acquitted on all counts...
...a long-haired American youth bravely decorating the upturned rifle of a National Guard with a flower...
...A lot of contingencies will arise that will require money...
...In this volatile atmosphere, "one man's loose cannon is another's freedom fighter...
...378 pp...
...He was the successor to the liberal Justice Louis Brandeis, to whom he wrote on his nomination: "If the Senate confirms, I pray God may give me the power to maintain your high standards and to serve the cause of liberalism in accordance with your noble traditions...
...representative from Michigan, he demanded an investigation into Douglas's extra-court activities, such as selling an article to Fact magazine when its publisher was involved in litigation in Federal court that might be appealed to the U.S...
...On the anniversary of the Bill of Rights in 1970, Douglas sent greetings to a friend in which he voiced a philosophy that should be remembered today: "Our claim to greatness rests not on the technology but on the ideals of humanity that make possible a viable society made up of multiracial, multi-religious, multi-ideological groups...
...Baez opened Live-Aid, the Philadelphia concert to raise funds for world hunger, in the summer of 1985...
...the CWP maintained from Day One that the attack was part of a conspiracy by city police and Federal agents to wipe out the party's leadership...
...The Douglas Letters is a human document...
...Against the backdrop of the city's soft air, waterfront real estate, wealthy tourists, drug traffic, and political intrigue, she sketches a web of disturbing interconnections over the years involving former CIA operatives, politicians, and businessmen...
...For all its resonances and reverberations, it would be a mistake—and an injustice to Morrison—to read this adult ghost story as a grim allegory...
...She traces her infatuation from adolescent movie fantasies up to their actual meeting, when she discovered he was fat...
...Suppose you beat the hounds past that point that-away...
...Often it is the voyeur within that sends us wandering into the pages of a public figure's personal life...
...In her memoir, And a Voice to Sing With, Baez writes, "Current trends toward 'new patriotism,' Ramboism, narcissism, and the emphasis about feeling good about oneself threaten our cultural, spiritual, moral, and artistic values and preclude any honest perception of or caring about the world beyond our borders...
...a third pumped blood down the dress of the main one—the women a schoolteacher bragged about, the one he said made fine ink, damn good soup, pressed his collars the way he liked besides having at least ten breeding years left...
...Elizabeth Wheaton has been trying to make sense of this tragedy since 1981, when she began investigating it for the Institute for Southern Studies...
...Douglas knew his friends were promoting him, and he cooperated...
...Despite his remarkable public accomplishments, much of his personal life was a failure...
...furter run the gamut from friendship to disillusionment as Frankfurter, who had started with Douglas as a liberal, turned increasingly conservative...
...The letters to Justice FrankArthur Weinberg is co-author with his wife, Lila, of the award-winning biography, "Clarence Darrow: A Sentimental Rebel...
...He looked like a huge chocolate angel," she recalls, "the famous little mustache jutted out over the huge handsome lips of possibly the finest orator this country has ever produced...
Vol. 52 • January 1988 • No. 1
