POLITICAL BOOK NOTES
political book notes Public affairs books to be published in November. The American Way of Life Need Not Be Hazardous to Your Health. John W. Farquhar, M.D. Norton, $9.95. Black...
...Richard Hoggart...
...Its value lies primarily in the author’s willingness to refute some of the cliched solutions liberals and conservatives have spouted as gospel for years...
...Black Consciousness in South Africa...
...Norton, $1 1.95...
...ITS, $14.95...
...Dan Horowitz, Moshe Lissak...
...William Safire...
...Smoke: Another Jimmy Carter Adventure...
...Norton, $10.95...
...University of California, $14.95...
...Since the turn of the century,” he writes, “liberals have underestimated the relevance of the criminal justice system and have opposed the search for more effective law enforcement as mere sympton alleviation-the equivalent of putting a Band-Aid on a cancerous sore...
...Medical School...
...Millard Arnold, ed...
...It is not true, Silberman says, that the courts are more lenient than they used to be...
...Arabel J. Porter, Andrew J. Dvosin, eds...
...To Build A Castle: My Life as a Dissenter...
...Oxford, $13.95...
...Medical Mystery: The Training of Doctors in the United States...
...The book is thoroughly researched and consistently well-written...
...Then a period of freedom in which to work again for human rights...
...James P. O’Donnell...
...Kent W. Colton, ed...
...University of Texas, $17.95...
...Houghton Mifflin, $13.95...
...The Federal Presence: Architecture, Politics and Symbols in U.S...
...Lois A. Craig, The Staff of the Federal Architecture Project...
...The miracle is that the courts work in spite of themselves, says Silberman, but they do work...
...University of Chicago, $19...
...But this book’s strengths far outshine its weaknesses, offering some badly needed insights into the problems of crime and criminals...
...Suspended by rope from a higher limb is a log which interferes with the bear’s access to the bait...
...This book is an edited version of Biko’s testimony, and it is powerful, eloquent stuff...
...or that plea bargaining distorts the judicial process (or that it is a recent innovation or the product of a heavy caseload...
...The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations...
...Or that the big apple was jive for a Harlem nightspot...
...James Presley...
...Lexington, $14...
...Susan E. Hirsch...
...The process by which the United States, in the person of Douglas MacArthur, transformed Japanese society is retold in William Manchester’s recent biography of the General...
...The evidence he marshalls to make his various cases is for the most part impressive and persuasive...
...Unfinished business is defined as “the reason usually given after much public soul-searching, for running again...
...Acropolis, $10...
...Doubleday, $12.95...
...Japan is the only nation to be the log...
...Silberman is at his weakest when he attempts to analyze why people commit crimes, and in particular, why there is so much crime among blacks...
...Times, $7.95...
...It comes back with more force...
...Bruce Catton, William Catton...
...Yale, $10...
...Ramon H. Myers, ed...
...Make-Believe Presidents: Illusions of Power, from McKinley to Carter...
...Janet Marinelli An Idea and Its Servants: UNESCO from Within...
...or that disparate sentencing practices undermine the deterrent power of the criminal law...
...Lexington, $12.95...
...But he loves them or at least, he loves the town, and certainly the language that cons, cajoles, twists, turns, and makes it all happen...
...jailed defendants are brought to court on the wrong day...
...Washington, they say, has become a “haven, a refuge” for a government increasingly isolated from its citizens by an antiseptic array of white marble...
...The New Politics of Food...
...Incident at Sagamihara...
...Pantheon, $8.95...
...Hoover Institution...
...It was his mantra, his refuge against the KGB’s efforts to break him down...
...Nicholas von Hoffman...
...It’s a romp through the excesses and peccadillos of the Roosevelts, Harding, Hoover, and the rest-and it’s fun...
...What has come out of those years is one of the most eloquent testimonials in the growing body of literature spawned by Soviet terror...
...Jordan Braverman...
...New York Times columnist terrible Bill Safire sticks it to this town thrice weekly in lively little essays that display his talent for the telling story and damning phrase...
...Houghton Mifflin, $15...
...Some revisionist history from von Hoffman...
...Where else could you learn that the phrase advice and consent was probably coined by merry old England’s King Sigiraed in 759 and that the obnoxiously simplistic slogan better red than dead was the British nuclear disarmament move men t ’s mutilation of a subtler Bertrand Russell thought...
...The log swings back and hits him...
...victims and witnesses are not notified of the date on which they are to appear...
...We learn a lot here about the “state of the art’’ of citizen participation-at the grassroots level, in national politics, in the evergrowing public interest movement-but almost nothing about what the rise in activist citizen participation has meant in American politics or why it has been accompanied by a decrease in voting participation...
...The value of getting the information to the West lay only partly in having it spread throughout the Soviet Union by the BBC, the Voice of America, and Radio Liberty...
...or that the guilty escape punishment...
...A lot of people who read him also dislike, distrust, and/or fear him...
...He weaves history, anecdote, and analysis into a lively picture that illuminates other points of view in different times...
...Most criminal courts undermine respect for law-not by their results, but by the shabby, haphazard way in which they are run...
...The Cultural Pattern in American Politics...
...He’s out to prove that nothing we’ve seen in recent presidents is anything new or different...
...The authors conclude that the growth of the federal government as a builder has closely paralleled the growth of federal power...
...Jail...
...And according to Ohtani, post-war Japan is a society with social problems f a m i l i a r to Americans-corrupt, c o r p o r a t e - d o m i n a t e d p o l i t i c s , commercialization of daily life, and large corporations that dominate the lives of their employees and the larger society...
...He organized hunger strikes and made good use of the Soviet law that requires every letter of complaint from a prisoner to be answered and investigated...
...Robert Kelley...
...He gave interviews, some secretly filmed for television, aud documented the authorities’ desperate measures to suppress the growing political dissent in the Soviet Union, including the use of psychiatric hospitals as instruments of terror...
...But each time, the log comes back to hit you harder until, finally...
...During his stays in jail, Bukovsky writes, he used every scrap of paper, every bare space on the wall or floor, to draw a castle in the minutest detail-turrets and tapestries, chandeliers and secret passages, tables, goblets, fireplaces and guests...
...In his ever-briefer out-of-jail periods, Bukovsky met with foreign correspondents...
...The Duel of the Giants: China and Russia in Asia...
...on the contrary, the evidence runs the other way...
...Robert Mead...
...Frank Packard The Bold and Magnificent Dream: America’s Founding Years...
...Roots of the American Working Class: The Industrialization of Crafts in Newark, 1800-1860...
...Legal Aspects of International Terrorism...
...Who Is To Be Tried...
...fiction) The Social Background of the American Communist Party Elites...
...More important was the sensitivity of the Soviet leaders to the contempt of world opinion...
...The essay on moderate, for example, traces views from Eisenhower’s policy of moderation, through Stevenson, Harriman, (“there is no such word as moderate in the democratic vocabulary”), LBJ, who in 1955 chose to term himself a “moderate” (how a word keynotes a time...
...It takes us from Thomas Jefferson, whose building designs endorsed the classical style that characterizes most government buildings, to the growth of Washington in the 19th century...
...Lexington, $21.95...
...For four-and-a-half days defense and prosecution lawyers took testimony from Biko, who was speaking publicly for the first time in the three years since he had been officially silenced by the government...
...Lexington, $16.95...
...Alexander Cockburn, James Ridgeway...
...Donald Drake...
...And the problems recent presidents have had getting control of the bureaucracy have plagued presidents ever since the civil service system was established...
...Doubleday, $12.50...
...The billions spent on new technology also have done virtually nothing to reduce crime...
...This latest version of Safire’s Political Dictionary is a triumph...
...University of Pennsylvania, $14...
...The Derelicts of Company K: A Sociological Study of Demoralization...
...Japan ’s bu sine ss-o rie n t ed Liberal Democratic Party-neither liberal nor particularly democratic-has held a stranglehold over the government since the war, and the Socialists, Communists, Social Democrats, the smaller leftist groups, have spent more time squabbling with each other than challenging the ruling party...
...The meat of it is the rationale and basis of Black Consciousness, a movement that represented his attempt to wrestle from the white apartheid government the psychological grasp it had on the minds of blacks...
...Stuart Langton, ed...
...Hoover Institution...
...In his chapter on police, for example, Silberman says, “the traditional remedies simply will not work,”even though liberals and conservatives continue to press for their particular answers to crime...
...Don F. Hadwiger, William P. Browne...
...Towards juvenile courts he is much less sympathetic, making the strong, but by no means novel, case that they have “encouraged criminal behavior in several ways...
...In May 1976 Stephen Biko, the leader of the Black Consciousness movement, appeared in a South African courtroom as a defense witness in a trial of nine other blacks...
...Once, as the sole political prisoner in a convict camp, he organized a letter-writing collective, which saw to it that about 400 letters of complaint left the camp every day...
...Nine essays on citizen participation that miss the point...
...He brushes aside the log and starts on the bait...
...C. H. Mike Yarrow...
...Regional Impacts of Federal Fiscal Policy: Theory and Estimation of Economic Incidence...
...Rawson Associates, $9.95...
...National Transportation Policy: A Study of Studies...
...Sharing the credit is Michael Scammell’s fine t r a n s l a t i o n and illuminating annotations...
...Blythe Babyak A Saga of Wealth: The Rise of the Texas Oilmen...
...Thanos Catsambas...
...Harvey Klehr...
...Sueyoshi Ohtani...
...He forayed from his castle only to bedevil the authorities...
...Christopher Lasch...
...But if liberals have been too preoccupied with underlying causes, conservatives have exaggerated the gains that can be wrung from tougher law enforcement...
...Ray Marshall, Virgil L. Christian, Jr., eds...
...As the Bukovskys of the world see it, the more furiously the regime rages, the more difficult it becomes to know who, finally, is the bear and who the -Leonard Reed United States and the Two China Regimes: Conflict or Cooperation...
...Lexington, $34.95...
...Police Computer Technology...
...Journeys Down the Line: Building the Trans-Alaska Pipeline...
...But at the same time, the belief that the Warren Court made life easier for criminals is also false: “There is no evidence to suggest that policemen make fewer arrests, or that prosecutors secure fewer convictions, because of Supreme Court decisions safeguarding the rights of the accused...
...Norton, $15...
...John Senior...
...Bukovsky first ran afoul of the KGB at the age of 17, when he took part in a satirical school play...
...Between then and his expulsion from the Soviet Union 17 years later, he spent 12 years in prisons, work camps, and psychiatric hospitals...
...Angrily, the bear swats the wood harder...
...There is, legend says, an old Russian technique for hunting bear...
...As it turns out, the courtroom testimony was Biko’s last public appearance...
...Japan is also among the few nations whose institutions were shaped and modeled after the United States...
...Alona E. Evans, John F. Murphy, eds...
...Emancipation and Equal Rights: Politics and Constitutionalism in the Civil War Era...
...Knopf, $15...
...Arlington House, $10...
...Criminal Violence, Criminal Justice...
...Or that politicians hate the word pol...
...You reach out for the right to express yourself and you brush against the State...
...The Death of Christian Culture...
...He says the belief of the conservatives that putting more cops on the street will reduce crime isn’t true...
...Government Buildings...
...Silberman, the Director of the Study of the Law and Science, has written an important book on crime...
...Safire’s dictionary offers over 800 pages of brief (200-300 word) essays on the words that tell what politics is all about...
...Joseph Nocera Crisis in Health Care...
...Drew Middleton...
...Nixon’s (01’ droopy jowls, von Hoffman calls him) involvement in Watergate was only the culmination of a tradition that’s been going on for a hundred years...
...A clearly guiding intelligence free of the column’s heavily partisan slant is evident throughout, and so is a quiet humor...
...Safire’s Political Dictionary: An Enlarged, Up-to-Date Edition of the New Language of Politics...
...prosecutors and defense lawyers are badly prepared,” and so on...
...Viking, $10.95...
...The Bunker: The History of the Reich Chancellery Group...
...MIT Press, $37.50...
...from the history of those pork barrel builders, the Army Corps of Engineers, to the birth in 1948 of the currently scandal-ridden General Services Administration...
...Philip Rahv...
...Random House, $15.95...
...Files are misplaced...
...a little more than a year later he died in a South African jail...
...Quaker Experiences in International Conciliation...
...he writes...
...He is a modern-day martyr now, and as such has become a figure larger than life...
...But these are tiny quibbles...
...Scribner’s, $10.95...
...and the bitter 1964 Republican civil war where those hoping to save Rockefeller from the advancing conservative swarms tried to trade in his liberal label for the “less offensive” moderate tag...
...Vladimir Bukovsky...
...This is a coffee table book with substance...
...Harvey A. Levine...
...Citizen Participation in America: Essays on the State of the Art...
...Americans who derided President Carter’s (short-lived) human rights initiatives or who thought the result was only to harden Soviet punitive measures against dissidence would do well to read To Build a Castle...
...His section on the courts is likewise revealing...
...Employment of Blacks in the South: A Perspective in the 1960’s...
...Harry Lesser...
...He attributes the decline in the art of political speech to “most politicians turn[ing] to the speechwriter for the complete job . . .” and not “collaborating enough”-when we all know that the tide on that little problem has turned, that this administration’s speeches are often pedestrian precisely because the speechwriters can’t get a phrase in edgewise...
...Essays on Literature and Politics, 19321972...
...Steven Jonas, M.D...
...Lexington, $19.95...
...Origins of the Israeli Polity...
...Lawrence W. Sherman., University of California, $14.50...
...Putnam, $14.95...
...Random House, $15...
...political book notes Public affairs books to be published in November...
...Random House, $12.95...
...Do you know what a bedsheet ballot is...
...Herman Belz...
...Quotes from William F. Buckley, Robert Clive, Leon Gambetta (a 19th-century French Premier), and Francis Bacon also enliven the entry...
...The process goes on until the log clonks him for good...
...Charles E. Silberman...
...Safire makes a few mistakes...
...Bait is placed in a tree...
...They had been charged under South Africa’s notorious Terrorism Act with various alleged efforts to undermine the government, but what was really on trial was Black Consciousness itself, the movement and philosophy founded by Biko as a university student that has so radically changed the way South African blacks think about themselves...
...Bukovsky likens the life of a dissenter in the Soviet Union to the bear’s situation...
...but if you want to see some of the human dimensions of Biko, his philosophy, his pragmatism, his political instincts, if you want to see why he was, and is, a truly important figure in contemporary Africa, this is a good place to look...
...Scandal and Reform: Controlling Police Corruption...
...Tamotsu Shibutani...
...victim of nuclear warfare, the only major capitalist society to have emerged from feudalism within this century, and the only major world power whose constitution explicitly renounces warfare...
Vol. 10 • November 1978 • No. 8
