POLITICAL BOOK NOTES
political book notes Public affairs books to be published in October, Almost Everyone’s Guide to Economics. John Kenneth Galbraith. Houghton Mifflin, $8.95. American Caesar: Douglas...
...Jones was not one of those writers who despaired over whether there was really anything to say...
...Far from crippling the economy with excessive wage demands, the British unions have agreed to a “Social Contract” that limits pay increases in return for dubious promises of controls upon inflation and maintenance of social services...
...George Orwell, Beatrice and Sydney Webb, Keir Hardie, and other prophets of the British welfare state all agreed that economic growth was essential for their dreams of a more equitable society...
...The Literacy Hoax: The Decline of Reading, Writing and Learning in the Public Schools and What We Can Do About It...
...There are some parts of this book that rise above the level of the rest, particularly in the first few chapters on campaign reporting in the 1976 presidential elections...
...Frederick Downs...
...Muddling To ward Fr iigali t y . Wa r ren Johnson...
...Clough believes that a productive relationship with China on that basis is possible...
...Edward Van Der Rhoer...
...Doubleday, $10.95...
...LeBoutellier says that his view draws on “true” Republican principles-that is, those of one century ago-but he never successfully explains why it has anything more to do with the modern Republican Party than with post-Great Society Democrats like Carter and Brown...
...Art Buchwald...
...American military protection is an important deterrent to the forceful conquest of Taiwan by the People’s Republic of China...
...Maurice Stans...
...Indiana University, $25/$8.95...
...Beverly Winikoff...
...A decade after the Beatles a n d Carnaby Street revolutionized popular culture and almost two decades after the “angry young men” produced a distinguished theater and literature, Nossiter predicts that Britain’s new exports will be its art and its lifestyles...
...However, he also makes the shakier claim that by investing less energy in their work than people in most industrial societies-and by spending more time on leisure pursuits, family, social r e l a t i o n s h i p s , and c u l t u r a l activities-the British are a model for the rest of the world...
...The Many Faces of Communism...
...What is not defensible about this book is its title-and the one chapter it refers to, a s h r i l l , m e a n - s p i r i t e d , and shallow caricature of the “Liberal mind” at his alma mater...
...Willie Morris...
...This book belongs in the “might have been” category of the season, primarily because Diamond and the MIT Study Group have been so good in the past...
...Morrow, $10.95...
...Lee Sproull, Stephen Weiner, David Wolf...
...Everest House, $10.95...
...Lexington, $25.95...
...All this resembles the celebrations of the American counterculture of the 1960s, and it deserves no more credence than Charles Reich deserved...
...Indiana University, $12.95...
...Hired Hands: Seasonal Farm Workers in the United States...
...For it seems that in loving Jones, Morris wanted to become Jones, had a slight cotifusion about just which writer was who...
...Books born of moseying aboutBehr has been a-correspondent variously for Reuters, Time-Life, the Saturday Evening Post, Newsweek, and others-are rarely great...
...Just outside intensive care the people who loved him-family and friends to whom he had given love, advice, encouragement held a vigil round the clock...
...In Great Britain, as in this country or anywhere else, when the economy stagnates, social meanness ensues...
...Frank A. Sloan, Jerry Cromwell, Janet B. Mitchell...
...Doubleday, $10...
...Murder U.S.A.: The Ways We Kill Each Other...
...Sometimes they would drift into his room to exchange last looks, last touches...
...Politics and History: Selected Essays...
...McGraw-Hill, $12.95...
...Alan P. Grimes...
...Senate, newspapermen are the world’s most incestuously selfidolatrous clan, Bearings deserves praise for the perspective it keeps...
...Deadly Magic...
...Miriam B. Conant, ed...
...Today they are a diminished presence...
...John LeBoutellier...
...Lin Farley...
...That philosophy, which he calls The New Homestead, is defensible enough with its suggestions about health care (government-supported catastrophic insurance), higher education (using universities to disburse governmentbacked student loans), and the cost of housing (an innovative mortgage plan...
...An intern phoned the bureau and explained that their man was suffering from malnutriti6...
...Private Physicians and Pubiic Programs...
...University of Chicago, $18...
...Putnam, $9.95...
...Granted, any compassion is a welcome change from bitter remembrances like Hemingway’s Moveable Feast, but reverence bordering on adoration also snuffs out life...
...Free Press, $14.95...
...Morris seems to have a lot of problems coming to terms with his own reputation and work...
...Diamond’s articles in New York magazine over the years usually have been models of good reporting and keen, thoughtful insight...
...Nutrition and National Policy...
...In principle, the United States has accepted the second of these conditions but has linked any such withdrawal to the prospect for a peaceful settlement of the T a i w a n q u e s t i o n by the Chinese themselves...
...John Hohenberg...
...L.eonard Reed Britain-A Future That Works...
...He is also rather shameless about patting himself on the back (“I respect both Bernstein and Greenfield, but I told them they were wrong and put my own views about anchormen into an article...
...Leroy N. Rieselbach...
...He spends far too many pages “correcting” reviews he considers unfair to Jones and generally flailing against the critics in an artlessly immediate way...
...If Nossiter had merely refuted the standard gloomy predictions about Great Britain, he would have performed a genuine service...
...Lexington, $13.50...
...The book has two problems, both of which could have been avoided if Morris had waited a few more years before writing, had waited until he better understood where Jones stopped and Morris began, until memories of the man dying no longer shrouded memories of the man...
...Wallace E. Tyner, Robert J. Kalter...
...Lacking the coalescing bonds that parties once provided, the various units of government will find it harder than ever to pull together toward coherent policy...
...Lexington, $17.95...
...yet from the beginning, Morris makes himself too large a part of his portrait of Jones-the photographer’s shadow obscures the picture...
...Lexington, $16...
...Taiwan is on the way to becoming a medium-sized, affluent, industrial society capable of exporting high technology items...
...At least that is the way rough, hard-drinking, fun-loving, gentle-hearted Jim Jones faced the congestive heart failure that ended his life...
...About the abysmal wages the wire services used to pay: a correspondent/ trainee in Reuters’ New York bureau collapsed on the street and was taken to Bellevue Hospital...
...The Terrors of Justice...
...Everett Carl1 Ladd, Jr...
...Harvard, $12.50...
...other industrial nations have simply been growing faster...
...Western Coal: Promise or Problem...
...Operation Morning Light: Terror in Our Skies-The True Stoiy of Cosmos 954...
...James B. Whittaker...
...Samuel S. Epstein, M.D...
...He married a would-be novelist and actress primarily remembered as a stand-in for Marilyn Monroe-beautiful, strong-minded, foul-mouthed, enchanting Gloria, yhto turned out to be the Right Girl, givingi him good times, understanding, childrln, and, what every writer needs even more than money-an absolute fan...
...Edwin Diamond...
...Their value lies in their flash insights, more common to journalists than to scholars, which add soupcons to history’s brew...
...Scribner’s, $9.95...
...Dodd, Mead, $9.95...
...This clear, well-researched book reports that after a slightly bumpy start the congressional budget committees have begun to ease into the arena of influence, if not power, and it reluctantly concludes that the able, photogenic Alice Rivlin and her Congressional Budget Office have been far less to the point...
...In that chapter, LeBoutellier shows the skill, which has reached full flower in Ben Wattenberg, of making a potentially important case unacceptable through sheer vulgarity of presentation...
...The Fracturing of America’s Political Parties...
...The North Sea oil will provide a long-awaited spur to the British economy...
...The writing is sloppy and repetitive (there are several identical paragraphs repeated in different chapters), and Diamond has an annoying habit of giving us glimmers of good ideas throughout the book and then failing to pursue them or explorc them in any depth...
...University of Chicago, $18...
...Hell, Jones adds in a throwaway Morris would turn over in his mind for years, that’s just like the stuff they wrote about me...
...Lexington, $16.95...
...A Model of U.S...
...That first chapter has virtually nothing to do with the rest of the book-but, then, neither does the title, raising suspicions that this is the price LeBoutellier paid to get his more worthy passages into print...
...Scandal and Reform: Controlling Police Corruption...
...Stephen H. Sosnick...
...Jones had been the center, the heart of the American writers’ colony, dispensing thousands of dollars worth of booze and priceless comfort, and, somehow, writing more books-some very good, some just okay-Some Came Running, The Thin Red Line, The Merry Month of Map-always making lots of money and friends...
...Bearings: A Foreign Correspondent’s Life Behind the Lines...
...Democracy and the Amendments to the Constitution...
...That is the decisive electoral fact of our day...
...World Change and World Security...
...He doesn’t entertain the notion that getting there will be easy...
...Bakke, DeFunis, and Minority Admissions: The Quest for Equal Opportunity...
...Longman, $12.50...
...He was living to finish Whistle, the last of th army trilogy (From Here to Eternity, T?ie Thin Red Line), where he hoped to say it all...
...McGraw-Hill, $12.95...
...This becomes explicit toward the end of the book, where Morris again feels compelled to go on for pages about a bad review, only this time a bad review of something Morris himself had written...
...For instance...
...Fortunately, it is not the only deterrent...
...Prentice-Hall, $12.95...
...A few years after their marriage the Jones moved to Paris, where their house on the Ile St Louis became the expatriate salon...
...Allan P. Sindler...
...Little, Brown, $15...
...Benjamin I. Page...
...The next day he was unconscious, and in another, dead...
...Norton, $9.95...
...But a “normalization” of U.S.-China relations as seen from Peking would require that the United States break diplomatic relations with Taiwan, withdraw all its forces from the island and annul its security treaty with the Republic of China...
...Steve Neal...
...Congress and the Budget...
...In this rather strange scene he reads the review aloud to Jones, who, with characteristic good sense, tells him to forget about it...
...A super life, a funny, raucous, loving, vivid man...
...The Midnight War...
...Poor Morris, who doesn’t know what James Jones knew, that a writer’s justification doesn’t come from the critics’ scribbles, but from his works and from his life...
...William Manchester...
...Its archetypal foreign correspondent is not so much Gregory Peck in a trenchcoat as Woody Allen in a swivet...
...Good News, Bad News...
...Prices...
...Joel Havemann...
...University of Chicago, $17.50...
...If British s o c i e t y e v e r d i s i n t e g r a t e s , Americans won’t be able to complain that the news media didn’t warn us...
...Norton, $7.95...
...Gateway, $7.95...
...Here, then, is the future which we confront-an increasingly partyless politics that fragments and disorients, and which thereby mocks our effort at mature self-government...
...Raymond Aron...
...About correspondents’ talent for getting to the point: While Belgian civilians in a state of shock were waiting to be airlifted out of the turbulent Congo, a British TV reporter dashed about the airport perio.dically stopping to bellow, “Anyone here been raped and speaks English...
...Paul Copperman...
...American Caesar: Douglas MacArthur, 1880-1964...
...Richard Goldhurst...
...Strategic Planning in a Rapidly Changing Environment...
...Jones had no worries on either count...
...MIT, $12.50...
...Harry k s s e r The Buchwald Stops Here...
...Random House, $10/$4.95...
...Morton A. Kaplan, ed...
...After a tour of duty in the bloody Pacific theater, he shouldered his way into Maxwell Perkins’ office with his first novel...
...Clement Bezold, ed...
...MIT, $12.50...
...France and the United States: From the Beginnings to the Present Day...
...Peggy Anderson...
...A Crisis for the American Press...
...Some, lamentably, are suspect...
...Conflict in Urban Transportation: The People Against the Planners...
...The Eisenhowers: Reluctant Dynasty...
...An absorbing account of the American intervention in Russia at the end of World War 1, one of the least-known disasters of American foreign policy...
...So this is how a writer dies...
...Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers...
...The institutional parties have not been s o m e w o n d r o u s g o o d . They have manifested their own fair share of error, dishonesty, and ineptitude...
...He concludes: “The institutional parties are crumbling...
...To recognize this truth, one need not be a conservative ideologue, on either side of the Atlantic...
...McNally & Loftin West, $20/$14.95...
...Bernard D. Nossiter...
...Ralph N. Clough...
...After chapter three, though, be prepared for pages upon pages of the random thoughts of Ed Diamond, slapped down on paper with no particular order or shape...
...relations with Taiwan in return for changes in the form of those relations...
...Like a good journalist, Behr delights in anecdotes...
...Lawrence W. Sherman...
...Taxes are higher in France, Sweden, Denmark, and Norway than in Britain...
...Peter B. Kenen...
...The Last Half-Century...
...It has not agreed to the other two propositions...
...Louis Fisher...
...Anticipatory Democracy: People in the Politics of the Future...
...Nurse...
...The Wired Society...
...One of his anecdotes is a bureaucratic gem...
...Paddington, $8.95...
...Organizing An Anarchy: Belief, Bureaucracy, and Politics in the National Institute of Education...
...If there are any severe problems afflicting Britain, Nossiter declares, they are racial and religious, rather than economic-warfare between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland and racial discrimination against Asians, West Indians, and Africans within England...
...Ballantine, $10...
...Sexual Shakedown: The Sexual Harassment of Women on the Job...
...John Godwin...
...But Jones was a lucky man...
...a series of pointless, meandering essays touching on every imaginable facet of the press: campaign reporting, television anchormen, the ratings, the newsmagazines, the rise of Rupert Murdoch, investigative reporting, and so on...
...Person/Planet: The Creative Disintegration of Industrial Society...
...In all his justification for Jones then, part of Morris’ game is justifying himself...
...Martin’s, $10.95, A remarkable account of what life is like for a nurse-thoughts, feelings, daily routines, life-and-death experiences, are all here...
...Most of the friends’ stories sound slow, muffled-as if Morris interviewed them a week after the funeral when they were still paralyzed with grief...
...Morris lived near Jones in the Hamptons and was a close friend only during Jones’ later years...
...Henry Malcolm Steiner...
...Houghton Mifflin, $9.95...
...Theodore Roszak...
...Good News, Bad News has a little of both, but not nearly enough to fill 17 chapters and over 200 pages...
...Its problem is whether it can survive without diplomatic relations with the United States...
...In this book, Washington Post reporter Bernard Nossiter attacks much of the popular media mythology about Great Britain, refuting myths by citing facts...
...Balance of Payrtients...
...But these chapters shine precisely because they contain what is missing from the rest of the book-the sense that Diamond and the Study Group did their homework, that they collected their anecdotes by working instead of by taking friends out to lunch...
...The Constitution Between Friends: Congress, the President, and the Law...
...Damn,”said the bureau chief, “I thought he had friends here...
...Societal Change and Politics id America...
...Lexington, $18...
...Sierra Club, $6.95...
...Neither democracy nor totalitarian, “Island China,” where, driven from the mainland, Chiang Kai-shek set up headquarters for the “Republic of China,” has been remarkable among developing countries for its political stability and economic success...
...Alfred L. Malabre...
...Ladd, who as co-author with Charles P. Haley of Transformations of the American Political Sistem was one of the first to perceive the decline of the political party in the United States, has written another good book about the phenomenon...
...The Politics of Cancer...
...A soldier who hated war, a victor who refused to conquer Japan, MacArthur was’ an educated man who knew much about the history of war and civilization, and too little about himself...
...The author doesn’t excel either as a writer or an analyst, but still his book is important...
...He was insufferably vain-his wife called him “Sir”-he was imperious, patriotic, the darling of the Daughters of the American Revolution and the lunatic Right...
...James Martin...
...Jonathan Kozol...
...Ken Auletta America’s Dilemma: Jobs vs...
...Not with a bang or a whimper, but with courage, steady courage, growing sadness, and enduring love for the too much he must leave behind...
...MIT, $14.95...
...Parties and Elections in an Anti-Party Age: American Politics and the Crisis of Confidence...
...In the hospital with heart failure for the fatal last time, Jones propped himself up in bed to make more notes on the last chapter of the work that was his life, but not all his life...
...Children of the Revolution: A Yankee Teacher in the Cuban Schools...
...Joseph Nocera Harvard Hates America...
...Norman C. Dahl, Jerome B. Wiesner...
...Where Have All the Voters Gone...
...Basic, $12.95...
...Since after the U.S...
...Implicit would be the postponement, perhaps for several years, of the question of Taiwan’s ultimate reunification with the mainland...
...Sierra Club, $12.50...
...For us haters, Douglas MacArthur made a hell of a target...
...In J a n u a r y , 1941, Joseph Grew, o u r ambassador to Tokyo, reported,“ ‘There is a lot of talk around town to the effect that the Japanese, in case of a break with the United States, are planning to go all out in a surprise mass attack on Pearl Harbor.’ Grew’s information was forwarded to Admiral Kimmel in Hawaii with an evaluation by Naval lntelligence stating that ‘based on known data regarding the present disposition and deployment of Japanese naval and army forces no move against Pearl Harbor appears imminent or planned for the foreseeable future.’ ” You can be certain that on the morning of December 8, ONl’s file copy was pulled and the words “known,” “present,” and “foreseeable” were underlined...
...JeanBaptiste Duroselle...
...Morris Janowitz...
...Perkins rejected the book but finally gave Jones a $500 advance on his next one, From Here to Eternity, a book that made Jones rich and famous...
...But in William Manchester’s gracefully written and wonderfully marbled account, the reader glimpses at not just America’s most brilliant wartime general but a genuinely interesting man...
...Island China...
...Increasingly apprehensive about Soviet ambitions in Asia, Communist China is unlikely to jeopardize by military adventure its stake in improving its relations with the United States and Japan...
...James Jones: A Friendship...
...Choices and Echoes in Presidential Elections: Rational Man and Electoral Democracy...
...Martin’s, $12.95/$5.95...
...Michael Schudson...
...Legislative Reform: The Policy Impact...
...Blythe Babyak The Killing Zone: -My Life in the Vietnam War...
...Delacorte, $9.95...
...Edward Behr...
...The Carter a d m i n i s t r a t i o n c o u l d a c c e p t t h e s e conditions if satisfied that the security and economic well-being of Taiwan were protected-that is, if Peking acquiesced on the continuation of the substance of U.S...
...John LeBoutellier is a super-earnest young man who was finance chairman for a Republican senatorial campaign while still a student at Harvard, and who has used the two years since his graduation to develop a new philosophy for his chosen party...
...Its combined portrait of Milton, the New Deal administrator, and Dwight, the Republican general, does much to explain the consensus that governed America from the late thirties until the mid-sixties...
...An interesting book about the breaking of the Japanese code during World War I1 by a man who worked on the project...
...political book notes Public affairs books to be published in October, Almost Everyone’s Guide to Economics...
...Behr’s anecdotes are best when they illuminate the news business itself...
...University of Chicago, $25...
...Columbia, $14.95...
...Lexington, $17...
...Viking, $12.50...
...The British economy has been growing, not stagnating, since World War 11...
...As unemployment continues to rise in Britain and living standards decline further, the most recent export has been punk rock, with its overtones of sadism and violence...
...In Clough’s view, although Peking cannot back down on its conditions, the impasse is not hopeless...
...What we’re left with instead is mostly bad news...
...His account of the Army lecturer who, concerned with the high incidence of VD in Vietnam, demonstrated on his middle finger the use of a condom only to find later that many GIs had followed his instruction literally, is a recycled chestnut from World War 11...
...A World of Men: The Private Sources of American F o r e i g n P o l i c y . Lloyd Etheredge...
...Jones called for a poem, Yeats’ “Lake Isle of Innisfree,” and read it aloud for his friends until the nurse ushered them out...
...Then there’s the problem with the narrator...
...Taiwan and its critical role in the Sino-American relationship is the subject of Ralph Clough’s first-rate study...
...And while Willie Morris writes it all with beauty and sensitivity, the book never quite lets us reach Jones, touch him, know him...
...Leo Heaps...
...Jeff Fishel, ed...
...MIT, $27.50...
...But in the last analysis, they managed to stand in the way of electoral chaos...
...Doubleday, $8.95...
...University of California, $14.50...
...Free Press, $15.95...
Vol. 10 • October 1978 • No. 7
