BOOKS

...Had Mikhail Gorbachev wanted to reply in kind to Ronald Reagan's sermons on human rights during the recent Moscow summit, he could have presented the President with a copy of Dangerous Dossiers...

...Members of PEN, the international association of writers, pledge themselves "to oppose any form of suppression of freedom of expression in the country and community to which they belong...

...Though heavily censored by the FBI, the files reveal a pattern of incredible stupidity as well as a totalitarian mindset among the operatives of our homegrown secret police...

...by Gene Bluestein Novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez remains a master of what has been called "magic realism...

...In this cogent essay, Richard Falk, professor of international law at Princeton (and a member of The Progressive's Editorial Advisory Board), cuts through the fog of propaganda and myth to discuss terrorism in rational terms...

...From the air raid on Libya to FBI surveillance of domestic dissidents, gross misconduct has been defended in the name of counter-terrorism...

...it is one of many occasions when the symptoms of love are discovered to be the same as cholera...

...BOO KS BRIEFLY Flying Porkbarrel WILD BLUE YONDER: Money, Politics, and the B-l Bomber by Nick Kotz Pantheon...

...492 pp...

...The temptation is to laugh at the FBI's bungles, but careers, lives, and the nation's political health have been severely damaged by the campaign against creative intelligence that was—and continues to be—waged by our own version of the KGB...

...17.95...

...It would be a tragic mistake," she concludes, "to think that censorship in the country will automatically fade away with the next Presidential election...

...Commenting on the Arab-Israeli struggle, Chomsky writes, "Whatever one's views...

...His new book, "Anglish-Yinglish: Yiddish in American Life and Literature," will be published in December by the University of Georgia Press...

...Government...

...Of the 100—all of them obsolete before the first one rolled off the assembly line—exactly one is more or less in service...

...Writers' Block DANGEROUS DOSSIERS: Exposing the Secret War Against America's Greatest Authors by Herbert Mitgang Donald I. Fine, Inc...

...Air Force's B-l bomber is the most expensive aircraft ever built...

...Garcia Marquez touches on many themes in this story of love withheld and then finally given...

...The U.S...

...Mitgang's disclosures deserve sober study...

...His 622 seductions fall short of Don Giovanni's 1,003 (in Spain alone) but like the Don he covers the entire spectrum: little ones, big ones, old ones, young ones, especially a young student whom he corrupts from a tender age...

...But as a line from a Yiddish folksong notes, love is worse than the plague—it kills you and kills you, yet you never die...

...It's simply a matter of waking up their souls...

...He decides to survive his lost ideal by replacing it with endless bouts of "earthly passion...

...6.95 (paper...

...REVOLUTIONARIES AND FUNCTIONARIES: The Dual Face of Terrorism by Richard Falk E.P...

...Portions of Peck's interview with Chomsky, which opens the collection, and of Chomsky's seminal essay, "The Manufacture of Consent," have appeared in The Progressive...

...Who's a Terrorist...

...In the local hospital, beds were placed in pots of water to prevent infection from climbing up the legs, while evening wear and chamois gloves were required in the operating room "because it was taken for granted that elegance was an essential condition for asepsis...

...For more than half a century ("fifty-one years, nine months, and four days," to be exact) Florentino suffers for his lost love...

...But there is nothing magic in this approach...

...The book confirms the claim...

...Florentino has always been a secret poet and is less influenced by the popular romances of the day...

...In recent years, terrorism has replaced communism as the all-purpose buzzword designed to rationalize unconstitutional actions by the U.S...

...In Love in the Time of Cholera, Garcia Marquez shows again that he is an encyclopedist of folk tradition...

...Despite his flowery effusions, Florentino seems a naturalistic casualty in just Zola's sense...

...James Peck, who edited this selection of Noam Chomsky's political writings, calls him one of our greatest dissenters...

...In this context the endless love affair between Florentino Ariz and Fermina Daza seems quite natural...

...Dutton...

...His tale this time is an epic of unrequited love...

...hence, attempts to purify the waters were resisted in order to preserve these "honorable ruptures...

...The old customs prevail...

...The water in the cisterns was also thought to produce hernias, considered a display of "masculine honor...

...in fact, Garcia Marquez is one of a number of contemporary writers who have discovered the basic style of folk artists and applied it to the conditions of our own lives...

...foreign policy—on the Cold War, the bloody intervention in Indochina, the current intrigues in Central America, and the perpetual conflict in the Middle East—is to come into contact with a careful, eminently rational, but totally devastating critic of this nation's conduct in the world...

...In his work, especially in his classic One Hundred Years of Solitude, fantastic occurrences are described in precise detail and discursive language...

...The uncle of one of the main characters exclaims, "Here they make new constitutions, new laws, new wars every three months, but we are still in colonial times...

...To read (or reread) Chomsky on U.S...

...In the end, overcoming their feverish passions, the lovers discover that "love was always love, any time and any place, but it was more solid the closer it came to death...

...Considering the close parallel between the lover and the artist—the compulsion to write is as clearly an affliction—Gabriel Garcia Marquez may be talking about the fate of literature as well...

...It is an astonishing account of the surveillance maintained by the FBI over some of this country's most distinguished writers...

...We are in one of those South American countries bordering the Caribbean where the legacy of colonialism retains its hold despite the economic and political changes that have taken place...

...But to a great extent these are evasions, ways to justify our passivity as citizens and to avoid taking responsibility for our own actions, or lack of them...

...Herbert Mitgang, the cultural correspondent of The New York Times, has used the Freedom of Information Act to obtain FBI dossiers on such writers as Pearl S. Buck, Theodore Dreiser, William Faulkner, Dashiell Hammett, Ernest Hemingway, Sinclair Lewis, Thomas Mann, John Steinbeck, and Tennessee Williams—and many more...

...24.95...

...His mother notes that his condition resembled cholera more than anything else...

...In fulfillment of that pledge, the PEN American Center has sponsored this disturbing account of increasingly severe assaults on freedom of information in the United States...

...When the cholera plague was proclaimed, the "garrison shot a cannon from Gene Bluestein teaches American Studies at California State University, Fresno...

...the fortress every quarter hour, day and night, in accordance with the local superstition that gunpowder purified the atmosphere...

...Still more impressive 'are Chomsky's truly radical observations on the role of intellectuals in shaping policy and selling it to the American people...

...222 pp...

...They meet as teenagers and carry on a monumental correspondence in every form of paper and ink until, in a moment of petulance, Fermina rejects her lover...

...313 pp...

...But the B-l differs only in scale from other Pentagon fiascos...

...Kotz places the responsibility where it belongs: "In explaining our defense woes," he writes, "we either defer to the experts or glibly blame powerful, impersonal and autonomous forces that are beyond our control...

...Censors at Work LIBERTY DENIED: The Current Rise of Censorship in America by Donna A. Demac PEN American Center, 568 Broadway, New York, NY 10012...

...Great Dissenter THE CHOMSKY READER by Noam Chomsky Pantheon...

...Zola, whose literary theory defined our precarious position, would be the first to agree...

...Worms in the village cisterns were thought to be supernatural creatures who "courted young maidens and could inflict furious vengeance because of love...

...19.95...

...There are few heroes in Kotz's carefully documented but eminently readable account—certainly not the labor unions which joined with contractors in support of this super-boondoggle, or even the peace lobbyists who, in their zeal to stop the B-l, allowed themselves to be suckered into backing the more efficient and, therefore, more dangerous cruise missile...

...Rejected by Fermina, who then marries the most eligible bachelor in town, a medical doctor, Juvenal Urbino, Florentino is advised by his mother to take advantage of his love sickness "while you are young, and suffer all you can, because these things don't last your whole life...

...Florentino illustrates the title of Garcia Marquez's book for, as soon as he fell in love, "his anguish was complicated by diarrhea and green vomit, he became disoriented and suffered from fainting spells...

...In the course of his life he has put together (only for the eyes of his lover) a "meditation on life, love, old age, death...

...This is the framework in which Florentine and Fermina are finally united, "in silence like an old married couple wary of life, beyond the pitfalls of passion, beyond the brutal mockery of hope and the phantoms of disillusion: beyond love...

...But she is wrong...

...331 pp...

...American taxpayers have shelled out $28 billion for 100 of these flying pork barrels—$280 million per plane...

...there surely is no justification for maintaining the illusions and misrepresentations that are so characteristic of the American literature on this subject...

...188 pp...

...When it comes to dispelling illusions and misrepresentations, Chomsky is unsurpassed...

...At one point in his literary adventures, Florentino rejects the books of Emile Zola, the founder of a system of literary naturalism in which humanity is seen to be the victim of a lethal combination of heredity and a crushing environment...

...My argument," he writes, "is that when governments, in times of war and peace, deliberately direct their violence at innocent civilians or, for that matter, detained soldiers, these governments are engaged in terrorist activity____" Though Falk shrinks from drawing the ultimate conclusion from his own logic, many thoughtful readers will be persuaded that in the final analysis, all violence perpetrated to achieve political or economic ends is terrorism...

...At the same time there has been a total destruction of the natural resources of the country, followed by incredible pollution: "All that was left was the vast silence of the ravaged land...

...At last his love is requited and Fermina accepts him as petulantly as she once turned him down: "A century ago, life screwed that poor man and me because we were too young," she tells her prudish daughter-in-law, "and now they want to do the same thing because we are too old...

...the others are laid up for repairs or modifications...

...But the more than fifty years of frustration has taken its toll on the lovers...

...Nick Kotz, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, tells a sordid tale of military stupidity, corporate greed, Congressional cowardice, and Presidential malfeasance over a thirty-year period of mindless weapons procurement...

...Things have a life of their own," we are told...

...Garcia Marquez insists that he simply records the reality of these places without exaggeration...

...Author Donna A. Demac (who has written on First Amendment issues for The Progressive) takes an admirably uncompromising view: She deals not only with the secrecy and suppression practiced by various agencies of the Federal Government, but also with assaults on the right to read, watch, and listen mounted in local communities, in corporate board rooms, in academia, and within the media themselves...