political book notes
political book notes Public affairs books to be published in May. Aspects of the Presidency: Truman and Ford in Office. John Hersey. Ticknor & Fields, $11.95. Here's Gerald Ford rehearsing in a...
...Keith Alan Lasko...
...as usual, the author's primary sources-in this case Domenici and his aides---come off looking like the heroes of a .Frank Capra film...
...Man, it's so frustrating,' the Senator said...
...9.95/$4.95...
...Lurking somewhere in this book is a fascinating story...
...all had gone nowhere...
...The Fleecing of America...
...it left [Domenici] sorely frustrated...
...He ')umped" at these ideas but "grasped them only as pills and BandAids...
...This is the free marketplace of ideas, right...
...Charles Peters Congressional Odyssey: The Saga of a Senate Bill...
...Mao...
...Next year you can turn it over for $6...
...Michael Arlen has written a narrative of the making of Bell Telephone's "Reach Out, Reach Out and Touch Someone" television ad-a great idea, arid well executed too, with lots of _piquant admanese talk about "concepts" and such...
...put it on...
...It's one for these inflationary times, and it says "buy high, sell even higher...
...It was when Mao grasped the gun that he got his act together...
...If housing goes up so fast you merely have to hold it for a while to make a profit, why does anybody ever sell...
...James David -Barber...
...9.95...
...This book is Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle as applied to reporting...
...9.95...
...Fereydoun Hoveyda...
...Under Truman, Hersey found the presidency "all nervous energy, moral intensity, emotion in harness, history clamoring for expression...
...Gregg Easterbrook...
...Mao never just learned anything: "The incident burned into Mao's broad brow for life...
...Swanberg...
...Robert Stloukal...
...Here's Gerald Ford rehearsing in a session with his speechwriter: "Carl Albert picked up Bella Abzug's hat by mistake...
...The Pulse of Politics: Electing Presidents in the Media Age...
...Times...
...Robert A. Katzmann...
...Thirty Seconds...
...Reid to cover it...
...Reid...
...10.95/$5.95...
...Charles Weiner...
...12.95...
...Farrar...
...He can and did in his book 800.000.000: The Real China...
...But this biography reads as though it was cobbled together over a long weekend when there were many distractions...
...Nicholas Lemann Thy Neighbor's Wife...
...Thomas N. Bethell The Palestinians...
...Instead, we ought to talk about "narrative journalism," of which this book is a good example-that is, nonfiction written with a plot, characters, dialogue, and other techniques traditionally associated with fiction...
...The role of warfare in Mao's philosophy...
...Gay Talese...
...Harper...
...Ross Terrill...
...Leonard Reed Blitzkrieg: From the Rise of Hitler to the Fall of Dunkirk...
...Pantheon...
...Women of Crisis II: Lives of Work and Dreams...
...Steven J. Rosenstone...
...Simon & Schuster...
...If I get a big laugh, would it be a good idea to gesture, as.if I'm putting on a big hatT' It would be hard to imagine Harry Truman going through that routine with an underling...
...What it all means, beyond a lot of logistical headaches for those involved, Arlen doesn't say...
...M. D. Bobbs-Merrill...
...Len Deighton...
...Jonathon Dimbleby...
...12.95...
...Also, he contends, never put off a purchase no matter how high the interest rates...
...Well, it has to do with minimizing the down payment...
...Early in 1977, New Mexico Senator Pete Domenici introduced a bill to impose fees on the barges that travel the federally-financed canal system...
...He read a magazine that "jabbed the rapier of modern Western ideas through the ribs of China's rigid traditions...
...10.95...
...So buy my secret now for $5...
...The World's Greatest Real Estate Book: The One Way You Can Make a Fortune in the 80s...
...The Lean Years: Politics in the Age of Scarcity...
...Although this is not docudrama, Reid approximates the flatfooted Wood stein style...
...Whitney Father, Whitney Heiress...
...Random House...
...17.50 .. Robert Oppenheimer: Letters and Recollections...
...Robert M. Kaus Criminals and Victims: A Trial Judge Renects on Crime and Punishment...
...Knopf, $14.95...
...And what is Stloukal's secret...
...Scribner·s...
...Lois G. Forer...
...Norton...
...Alan Lechner...
...Viking...
...Just send the money...
...The Fall of the Shah...
...If he had not expelled or murdered his Jewish scientists, they would have given him the atom bomb first...
...17.95...
...He "hurled several mental grenades into the packed trenches of the Yanan intelligentsia...
...Robert Coles...
...One can't help fearing that such imagination today would not be rewarded in the promotion policies of the American military...
...Mark O. Haroldson, that bald Mormon leaning on a Mercedes in those newspaper ads, will tell you for $10...
...and disappeared for three days...
...This isn't just another financial self-help book that takes 120,000 words to say "buy low, sell high...
...The Democrats come up with Model Cities and we come up with the Ocean Dumping Act...
...Financial propositions like this always make you stop to wonder...
...This works as long as you plan to turn the houses over fast...
...Stloukal wiIr tell you how for $12.95...
...Delacourt...
...William Proxmire...
...It isn't that Ross Terrill can't write well about China...
...15/$3.95...
...Wyndham...
...Ford wistfully asks his advisers, "Can't we come up with better titles for things...
...Straus & Giroux...
...Houghton Mifflin...
...Street Games: Inside Stories of the Wall Street Hustle...
...Richard J. Barnet...
...14.95...
...Act according to the principles laid down," he admonished...
...But the narrative moves along nicely, and_gives an intelligent account of the day-to-day strategies of legislating and lobbying...
...This book, while mostly a recapitulation of the familiar, has a couple of interesting points...
...Harper & Row...
...12.95...
...Yale...
...Even if the rates come down later, the price will have gone up so much you'll lose...
...The Duping of the American Voter: Dishonesty and Deception in Presidential Television Advertising...
...Similar measures had been proposed by every administration since Franklin Roosevelt's...
...Near death, he took to writing out cryptic messages...
...What did Mao do with his new ideas...
...8.95...
...Doubleday...
...It's something of a tribute to the old fox that China went through turmoil while competing factions pretended to know what those principles were...
...Luckily for Domenici, early in 1977 the editors of the Washington Post "decided that a good way to explain the legislative process would be to pick a typical bill and follow its progress in a series of articles...
...Early on, Terrill's editor seems to have gone out for a walk, leaving the author alone with an inexhaustible supply of excruciating metaphors...
...He never could figure out what to do about China's bureaucracy-by far the largest in the worldexcept to create turmoil every few years and see what happened...
...The Trial of Patrolman Thomas Shea...
...Robert Spero...
...The Great Billion-Dollar Medical Swindle...
...Deighton's other interesting point is that Hitler's anti-Semitism kept him from ruling the world...
...One gets the impression that Terrill must have cut himself or fallen downstairs shortly before writing this paragraph...
...The British and the French had 700 more tanks than the Germans in May 1940, but Heinz Guderian had a better idea about how to use his...
...Mao learned how to make revolution but not how to run a governm~nt...
...Michael J. Arlen...
...Jane Kramer...
...Quartet...
...lippincott / Crowell...
...Who Votes...
...A term that badly needs replacing is "The New Journalism," which has been so loosely used over the last ten years that it covers such disparate writers as Hunter Thompson and Gay Talese...
...Alice Kimball Smith...
...Addison- Wesley...
...Harvard...
...Thomas Hauser...
...Under Gerald Ford, Hersey found it relaxed, "floating in a vacuum of history...
...8.95...
...Stloukal's thesis is to buy everything you can whenever you can...
...10.95...
...12.95...
...substance to a time of image...
...In the end, the reader is left with the uncomfortable feeling that it's more than a matter of titles-that we have been sliding from an era of...
...Houghton Mifflin...
...One is that, given equipment of roughly equal quality, imaginative use of it can make up for a considerable difference in quantity...
...But now that Iknow, I'll tell you for $5...
...Regulatory Bureaucracy: The Federal Trade Commission and Antitrust Policy...
...Norton...
...Charles Peters...
...Of course, with the Post running front page stories on the bill, the bargefee legislation became anything but typical, and the unusual publicity it received propelled the previously doomed fee through Congress...
...C. Northcote Parkinson...
...The Law: Or Still in Pursuit...
...Raymond E. Wolfinger...
...14.95...
...10.95...
...He speculates that Ford's years in Congress conditioned him to juggle innumerable problems on a day-today basis with more interest in the mechanics of the process than with the effect Qf the decision...
...Michael Brown...
...9.95...
...You'll get rich, he says, because all real estate always appreciates...
...The story might have been a jumping-off point for interesting speculation about the vision of America imparted by "mood" advertising, but, as is often the case in narrative journalism, the smooth spinning of the yarn leaves no room for that kind of digression...
...Jane Hallowell...
...17.50...
...How Washington Really Works...
...Freeman...
...Unsettling Europe...
...He was with Truman sporadically over three months and, 25 years later, with Ford almost constantly for one week...
...John Hersey was given the unusual opportunity of watching closely while each of two presidents-Truman and Ford-conducted the nation's affairs...
...Laying Waste: The Poisoning of America by Toxic Chemicals...
...The Post picked Domenici's proposed barge-charge as its typical bill, and it picked reporter T.R...
Vol. 12 • May 1980 • No. 3
