SCRAPBOOK
Scrapbook THE RADCLIFFE READING LIST The notion of assembling a panel of judges and voting on the “Random House/Modern Library List of the 100 Best English- Language Novels of the 20th Century”...
...Each of these books “speaks to today’s time,” explained publishing student Sam Lubell...
...STAND BY YOUR PERSON Was it just coincidence or did President Clinton sound a lot like Lou Gehrig the weekend before last during his Arkansas trip...
...And the commander of the raid into Laos, Eugene McCarley, has now sued CNN for defamation...
...This is an unsettling reaction, to say the least...
...HEED THE RUMSFELD REPORT Iran launched a new North Korean-designed missile last week that will extend the deadly reach of the mullahs to Israel and beyond, as well as threatening thousands of U.S...
...When the Congressional Research Service analyzed the Rutgers study recently, it found an array of technical problems with the study...
...And Douglas Adams’s A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy the 72nd...
...Still, his efforts are likely to meet with some skepticism: NOW and the ACLU haven’t suddenly turned antiabortion...
...Regardless of their precise range, the missiles represent a new strategic threat in the region for which the United States and its allies are ill-prepared and against which, it bears repeating, we are all but defenseless...
...They declared Alice Walker’s The Color Purple the 5th best novel of the 20th century...
...Pay attention...
...John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men the 12th...
...CNN’s star correspondent Peter Arnett, meanwhile, said that the Pentagon’s findings were “good enough for me...
...John Knowles’s A Separate Peace the 67th...
...The Modern Library’s editors presented the list to the 100 students in Radcliffe College’s summer publishing course, the most prestigious workshop in the trade, a sixweek training camp for aspiring publishers and editors...
...Now a Republican is trying to get into the act...
...Iran’s may go slightly farther...
...Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh the 22nd...
...Then again, had Arnett disputed findings with which the North Vietnamese concurred, that too would no doubt have been a career first...
...And in outrage over the predominance of white, male, American authors and the heavy literariness of the Random House list, the Radcliffe students prepared their own counter list...
...nerve-gas use, real or concocted for propaganda purposes...
...Clinton, speaking to supporters at a fund-raiser in Little Rock, offered the gender-scrubbed nineties version: “I’ve been the luckiest person in the world,” he said...
...CNN unsurprisingly has reached a monetary settlement with retired admiral Thomas Moorer, who said his interviews were misconstrued by Oliver and Smith...
...If the administration is truly not surprised, then it has been derelict in its duty...
...The report, issued by a commission chaired by former secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld, not only warns of imminent missile threats of the sort exemplified by Iran’s launch last week, but suggests that the Clinton administration has been lax about the threat and that the intelligence community has consistently underestimated missile dangers...
...But then, if millennium fever compels you to do this kind of thing, you could do worse than the folks at the Modern Library...
...But then, some people seem to like that sort of thing: The irrepressible creditclaimer Harold Evans—fresh from insisting that he was the one who actually fired James Fallows as editor of U.S...
...The American people have continued to support me in the face of unprecedented attacks...
...As expected, the search of Vietnam-era military archives turned up no evidence of the tall tale that CNN and Time had already retracted—namely, that U.S...
...And the Modern Library’s judges...
...Still, as we said, it could have been worse...
...THE SCRAPBOOK was at first inclined to mock the Random House editors for their list, but now they look like the last brave sentinels at the Bastille...
...Frank L. Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz the 47th...
...Amid the administration’s understandable consternation over Iran’s tests last week, the president told reporters, “We’re very, very concerned about it, but not surprised by it...
...military of atrocities—had no record of any U.S...
...Not only did the Pentagon find no evidence for the story that got CNN fantasists, er, producers April Oliver and Jack Smith fired, but the report noted that even the North Vietnamese—who never shied from accusing the U.S...
...Still, it’s not too late for the president to draw the obvious conclusion from the findings of the Rumsfeld commission: The threat has arrived, and we must redouble efforts to deploy effective missile defenses...
...News & World Report— felt compelled to insist that the bestnovel list had really been his idea back when he was president of Random House...
...troops in the Middle East...
...But does Joseph Heller’s Catch-22—funny as it is— belong at number 7? Or John O’Hara’s Appointment in Samarra at number 22...
...Chris Smith of New Jersey has introduced legislation that proposes to penalize states that deny extra benefits to women who have babies while on welfare...
...The future of the publishing of American fiction will be in the hands of these Cliffies...
...This policy—informally known as the “family cap”—was first introduced in New Jersey in 1992 and is now in place in 23 other states...
...The North Korean version of the missile has an 800-mile range...
...Or Erskine Caldwell’s Tobacco Road even in the top 5,000...
...You could do a lot better, too...
...In fact, it is already worse...
...The Clinton administration has backburnered missile defenses that might be effective against the likes of Iran’s new Shahab-3...
...The judges are right that James Joyce’s Ulysses is the best novel of the 20th century (every once in a while, the shibboleths of the cocktail-party set turn out to be correct...
...Gehrig, of course, was eschewing self-pity...
...THE DISAPPEARING GAS ATTACK Last week, the Pentagon issued its report on CNN and Time’s ill-fated nerve-gas “scoop...
...That doesn’t persuade Smith though, who joins strange bedfellows from the National Organization for Women and the ACLU in wanting to overturn familycap policies...
...DOFFING THE FAMILY CAP Ever since President Clinton signed the welfare-reform bill two years ago, his administration has been fiddling with technical parts of the law to blunt its impact...
...Scrapbook THE RADCLIFFE READING LIST The notion of assembling a panel of judges and voting on the “Random House/Modern Library List of the 100 Best English- Language Novels of the 20th Century” was a silly one to begin with—an effort to arrive at a 1950sstyle consensus that hasn’t existed since, well, the 1950s...
...I just felt like they were pretty out of it...
...With luck, the Iranian launch will serve as the exclamation point on an important report released just a week earlier on ballistic-missile threats to the United States...
...After them, the deluge...
...Smith, co-chairman of the House Pro-Life Caucus, believes the “family cap” has led up to 1,000 New Jersey women to opt for abortion rather than give birth to a child and be denied extra benefits...
...Besides lowering welfare spending, many welfare experts believe the family cap may have reduced the number of births to women on welfare, while also providing a disincentive for women to start receiving welfare benefits...
...THE SCRAPBOOK thinks his acquiescence may be a career first for the famously anti-Pentagon Arnett, who fought successfully to save his CNN job by arguing that he hadn’t done any reporting on the nerve-gas story but just read the script...
...they’re just willing to resort to any tactic that will result in higher welfare payments...
...Special Forces were sent to Laos in 1970 to assassinate defectors, and that while there they launched a nerve-gas attack that killed Laotian women and children...
...Just how hard he’s going to push his House colleagues to pass the legislation isn’t clear, but Smith enjoys considerable clout with the House’s pro-life caucus...
...If by out of it he meant that they included books the Radcliffe students hadn’t read in junior high school, he may be right...
...In his famous valedictory speech to Yankee fans after contracting the disease that would bring him down in his prime, Gehrig, choking back tears, called himself “the luckiest man on the face of the earth...
...But his evidence comes from a flawed Rutgers University study...
Vol. 3 • August 1998 • No. 45
