political book notes
political book notes Public affairs books to be published in September American Dreams: Lost and Found. Studs Terkel. Pantheon, $14.95. The American Establishment. Leonard Silk, Mark Silk....
...Ixxington, $31.95...
...Opposite is a skillful composition of four photos of men in the backs of cars with their heads blown open...
...Jo Ann Spanbauer No Man’s Land...
...Pauline Maier...
...Doubleday, $14.95...
...Jane Jacobs...
...12.95...
...Historians perform a valuable service...
...history, t o him, has been one uninterrupted progression of a fiendish “apocalyptic imperial strategy” to subjugate the world...
...Free Press, $15...
...John Toland...
...Doubleday, $14.95...
...The things that Don’t Count for Williams are any instances when the United States behaved morally...
...You’ll find page after page of fresh and uncluttered insights into the lives and times of the Longs, Maddox, Mills, Ervin, Bond, Carter and many other surnames you would be less likely to recognize...
...and that it’s tricky to decide how to makea buck with “new technology...
...10.95...
...In this book, thelatest attempt to reduce American society to a set of flash cards, everything boils down to the mighty monoliths of Business, Government, and what the authors call “the third force, the Establishment...
...Jeremy Rijlcin with Ted Howard...
...Particularly awkward for Williams’s analysis is the greatest single argument in favor of America as, generally, a moral nation...
...William Appleman Williams, Oxford, $14.95...
...The point of this book about the steel industry is that you can’t tell very much from statistical averages...
...Williams dismisses as Don’t Count the inconvenient fact that we have not made a move against our wealthiest and most desirable neighbor, Canada, since 1812...
...Southerners: A Journalist’s Odyssey...
...Aclose lookat the first presidential candidate to legitimize himself in the primaries-a conservative man with liberal principles and instincts who isn’t remembered very well these days...
...NAL, $13.95...
...Along the way, it straightens out a few myths, reminding us that the U.S...
...more research...
...We didn’t even try...
...Random House, $8.95...
...Things get so tangled in statistical complexities that the book’s valile in debate is minimal...
...The lack of spoils-jobs in governmentis the real key to what’s wrong, as I argue elsewhere in this issue...
...Henry Wechsler, ed...
...The “old nationalists” clung desperately to laissez-faire economics and viewed any collectove activity as a moral and mortal danger to Americanism (Taft, Bricker, MacArthur...
...There, on the left, is a full-page art shot of five rivers of blood streaming from a man’s blown-open head...
...All done with that certain j e ne sais guoi...
...So even failed assaults on the larger issues like this one have the effect of focusing our attention where it belongs, and for that we should be grateful...
...Lexington, $27.95...
...An impressive analysis of the dynamics and development of the Republican Right as a counterforce to the New Deal’s domestic and international interventionist policies...
...Even if you never want to read another word about Billy...
...Herbert G. Klein...
...Enzo Catania...
...Few convention delegates are chosen by political bosses...
...Basic, $13.95...
...Thomas A. Bailey...
...Gold recommends (what else...
...Blount lives in the North now and hangs out with some suspicious people in Manhattan and worries too much about explaining himself to them...
...Kefauver: A Biography...
...Once, the Right’s common ground was laissez-faire capitalism, with small business interests as a base, accompanied by isolationism toward Europe and imperialism toward Asia...
...Whatever it is you’re doing that seems so terribly important, put it down and go get yourself a copy of this book and about nine cold cans of Pearl beer and all your old Chuck Berry records, and send the kids off to play with their friends so you can sit somewhere comfortable and laugh out loud without feeling self-conscious...
...But even though Lurie is dead wrong, I admire him for trying...
...don’t let that keep you away from Crackers...
...It should be read by anyone getting into politics or political journalism- because it shows the rewards, frustrations, and addictive nature of politics with sympathy and a sharp eye...
...After the 26th Amendment gave 18-year-olds the vote in 197 1, many states quickly gave them the right to drink, too, Some states since have decided that it wasn’t such a hot idea: Iowa, Michigan, and Massachusetts are among those that have jacked up the legal age again...
...the power to nominate...
...Mafia makes the perfect coffee-table conversation starter, enlivening any home with that fashionable adoration of violence you thought you could Making It Perfectly Clear...
...The author believes that party politics produce poor presidents because convention delegates are controlled by political bosses...
...Lexington, $22.95...
...Mafia is here...
...Southern journalists run the same risk...
...When the Establishment talks, people listen...
...Among their limp conclusions: “Prestige counts...
...This book tells you more than you’d want to know about American interventions abroad, but is worth reading...
...Housing Policy for the 1980’s...
...Nutrition Policy in Transition...
...An echo chamber seems t o exist out there in the country for what the Establishment says...
...12.95...
...The prose does not transcend, but the logic is clean, the perspective sensible, and the tone never self-inflating...
...we had the irresistible atom bomb and the means t o deliver it...
...Gregg Easterbrook Counting Our Blessings: Reflections on the Future of America...
...The whole package was wrapped in anticommunism confused by overtones of racism, anti-Semitism, and anti-Catholicism...
...Ronald Steel...
...has been a world power since the 1850s, not just since the days of McKinley...
...Gold’s generalizations are somewhat at odds with his main message-that you should distrust generalizations...
...Roy Blount, Jr...
...Small wonder poor Nelson Rockefeller was so confused...
...Macmillan, $14.95...
...Is there another country anywhere whose last war with a rich and vulnerable neighbor is 170 years in the past...
...Minimum-Drinking Age Laws: An Evaluation...
...Knopf...
...Pat Martin The Old Revolutionaries: Political Lives in the Age of Samuel Adams...
...It also provides interesting glimpses of Hubert Humphrey, Adlai Stevenson, Averell Harriman and others...
...Marshall Frady...
...Hal Handerson The Food Lobbyists...
...Crackers...
...Oxford, $19.95...
...Empire as a Way of Life...
...If imperialism is our “opiate,” someone’s not passing the pipe...
...Jurgen Schmandt...
...Dale Rogers Marshall, Robert Montgomery, eds...
...This book, written by a veteran political reporter and friend of Kefauver’s, will sharpen our memories...
...Presidential candidates win support, he says, with “promises of spoils to party hacks,” The result is that the American voter “has been effectively deprived of...
...Little, Brown, $19.95...
...ambassador) who saw it firsthand...
...The Question of Separatism: Quebec and the Struggle over Sovereignty...
...Charles Peters The Pugnacious Presidents...
...A graceful collection of essays on our recent history by a diplomat (best known as Nixon’s U.N...
...History and Memory...
...The Worldly Economists...
...Because of the great increase in the number of presidential primaries, the voter has more of a voice in the nominating process than ever...
...Atheneum, $12.95...
...Free Press, $15.95...
...P. Taylor...
...Namely, our almost serene inactivity from 1945 to 1949...
...Thomas N. Bethel1 Entropy: A New World View...
...Liebling observed that “Southern politicians, like sweet corn, travel badly...
...The authors struggle t o quantify the relationships between drinking age, accidents and traffic fatalities, and other alcohol-related problems...
...The central issue is Quebec’s separation from the rest of Canada (Jacobs thinks well of “sovereignty-association,’’ under which Quebec would retain certain ties while dropping others), but the real value of the book is in its exploration of the social, economic, cultural, and bureaucratic meanings of “connection”and “separation...
...The entire Establishment, they say, “can trace its roots t o a real religious establishment, the Unitarian Church of Massachusetts,” simply because Harvard was once Unitarian...
...Daniel Patrick Moynihan...
...Leonard Lurie...
...Miles gets hopelessly bogged down in sociological gibberish at times, especially when discussing “class” (which, alas, is often...
...Lexington, $25.95...
...political book notes Public affairs books to be published in September American Dreams: Lost and Found...
...Knopf, $15...
...Between Blount and Frady, the South The View From 80...
...Michael W. Miles...
...Little, Brown...
...Read Blount now, while the kernels are still full of juice and texture...
...They were also willing to deal with Europe and Asia, though they had differing ideas about how to do it (McCarthy, Goldwater, Nixon again, andpossibly- Reagan...
...Lexington, $18.95...
...The Italian Americans: Troubled Roots...
...Perhaps this explains why Williams’s book is, for a historian,a refreshingly brief 240 pages...
...That America didn’t attack Russia, didn’t nuke the Maoist hordes, and didn’t annex Brazil...
...The Silks’ book consists of a long-winded dissertation on what the word “Establishment” means, followed by brisk but aimless sketches of its standard-bearers-Harvard, -The New York Times, the Ford Foundation, Brookings...
...and that luck determines whether a president can keep usat peace...
...Lexington, $23.95...
...Before writing it, he dispensed with the bulk of American history...
...If you’re like me, you’ve been asking yourself, “When will they put out a reallyartsy book with 134 pages of close-up photos of dead mobsters...
...Another short, original book from the author of The Death and Lye of Great American Cities and The Economy of Cities...
...Andrew Rolle...
...But to conclude from this that our sole national yearning is to ”take wealth and freedom away from others,” as Williams maintains, is like concluding that anyone who has eaten chocolate speaks Dutch...
...There have been, of course, far too many times-the Spanish-American War, Chile, Iran-when pure lust overcame the principles we claim to represent...
...The authors lay on with a trowel their notion that Harvard is the central institution of the cosmos, if not beyond...
...We could have brought the world to its knees...
...Here, for example, is his characterization of Joe McCarthy’s proposal to draft striking coal miners: “This is the convergence thesis of radicalism and the metropolitan elite, which is a logical expression of the dual resentments of provincial businessmen or even of the urban middle class, who feel pressure from above and below in the social structure...
...Be grateful to the South for producing writers like Roy Blount, and promise yourself not to feel guilty if you never read another word on the op-ed page of the Times...
...Three separate and distinct entities, with no interlocking directorships...
...But “Eastern internationalists“ tolerated New Deal social policy and took a t least a financial interest in Europe (Willkie, Dewey, Nixon...
...Charles Fourtney...
...Charles W. Yost...
...The U.S...
...Malcolm Cowley...
...Stein & Day...
...Party Politics...
...Where has the author been for the past 20 years...
...Bailey is sometimes loose with facts (his analysis of the Mayaguez incident makes For& and Kissinger look much better than they deserve) but his reasoning is generally sound and insightful...
...Most of what is written about politics today by political scientists and journalists alike is chickenshit, because the writers either don’t care enough or don’t know enough to take on basic questions about what is wrong with the system...
...Frank A . Sloan, Bruce Steinwald...
...At his best, Frady is a model for other reporters-a watcher, a listener, a noticer of the small quiddities, and in command of wonderful rhythms and cadences a t his typewriter...
...The photos are big, tastefully cropped, and scarcely cluttered by distracting captions...
...Bela Gold, Gerhard Rosegger and Myles- G. Boylon, Jr...
...In fact, there aren’t that many bosses around these days...
...They tell us which things Don’t Count...
...After going to great lengths to color-code the behavior of Establishment forces, the Silks make no effort to suggest what any of it has to do with anything...
...James Fallows Revolution and Revolutionaries...
...Insurance, Regulation, and Hospital Costs...
...Viking, $10.95...
...As in her earlier books, Jacobs’s strength is the precise unraveling of questionsfor example, the circumstances that permitted the only peaceful separation of one country from another (Norway from Sweden, early in this century) and the reasons why Norway, with a population smaller than Quebec, now has a more highly developed economy than Canada does...
...A breed of “new nationalists” emerged after World War 11, willing and sometimes anxious to include Catholics, blue-collar workers, and ethnic groups in their coterie if it would enhance their chances of gaining power...
...There Also aren’t that many spoils for the presidential candidate to offer...
...I’m sure everyone will have his favorite scene of slaughter, but I know I leave my copy cracked open to pages 96-97...
...or anyone else name of Carter...
...Viking, $6.95...
...All U.S...
...had a churning industrial machine reamed out to full capacity, while the rest of the world was still smoldering...
...Robert Jacobi Mafia...
...Harold Guither...
...Martin’s, $8.95...
...The author’s thesis is that “imperialism is the opiate of the American people...
...Robert Sobel...
...He also likes to quote himself, always a suspicious trait...
...Well, wait no longer...
...Norton, $14.95...
...University of Tennessee, $18.50...
...Evaluating Technological Innovations: Methods, Expectations, and Findings...
...Don’t Count...
...that we didn’t win all of our wars before Vietnam...
...The Odyssey of the American Right...
...After you’ve read Blount’s Crackers [noted above] you owe it to yourself to go on to this collection of magazine pieces written by Frady between 1965and 1979...
...Walter Lippmann and the American Century...
Vol. 12 • September 1980 • No. 7
