POLITICAL BOOKNOTES
America the Poisoned. Lewis Regenstein. Acropolis, $16.95. Regenstein, vice president of the Fund for Animals, has a healthy contempt for at least two species: the corporate crooks and the...
...What’s missing are anecdotes that might have lent a more human element to Warren’s evolution...
...Tax Revolt: Something for Nothing in California...
...The authors go so far as to call this phenomenon the “revolt of the haves”-which happens to be the title of Robert Kuttner’s far more readable and informative book on the same subject...
...But the conclusions are predictable, e.g., rich people supported the tax revolt more strongly than poor people...
...Abram’s autobiography is what so many others in this genre aren’t: unstintingly candid, thoughtful, and at times inspiring...
...22.50...
...a fervent anticommunist who fought to preserve communists’ rights...
...Therefore, government aid causes decline...
...Forced Options: Social Decisions for the 21st Century...
...Wallace J. Thies...
...Not many shades ofgrey here...
...and a central figure in the detention ofJapanese-Americans during World War 11, whose opinion in Brown v. Board of Education was the century’s biggest victory over racism...
...John Barker...
...Samuel Chavkin...
...Wayne Greenhaw...
...Morris wisely focuses on AI Haig, bureaucrat, in thisthoughtful biography, which should prove indispensable for those interested in why Washington’s highest ranks are riddled withsecond-rate talents...
...The Superhistorians: Makers of Our Past...
...Chavkin’s one excess is his portrayal of Salvatore Allende as a martyred messiah for the poor...
...There’s nothing necessarily bad about authorized biographies, though readers do deserve to be forewarned...
...Stephan Lesher...
...Louisiana State Univ., $12.95...
...19.95...
...His major conclusions as to why the U.S...
...Instead of looking on in tacit approval, judges should review these decisions and overturn those that are contrary to the public interest...
...If anyone knows Haig’s heart, it’s his alter ego, Richard Nixon, who recommended him as secretary of state to several Republican leaders and Reagan by telling them the general was “the meanest, toughest, most ambitious s.0.b...
...Okay, but how...
...14.95...
...Macmillan...
...An explanation for this lies in the back of the book, where one learns that AFSCME underwrote Goulden’s expenses and promised “to purchase enough copies from the publisher to make the book commercially feasible...
...The author, who worked with Haig for acouple OfyearsontheNational Security Council, traces Haig’s rise from junior officer under General Douglas MacArthur to secretary of state, carefullydetailing thevarious dissemblings, panderings, and outright lies that helped Haigreach the pinnacle of power, leaving little doubt that heis interested in returning there...
...12.75...
...By using narratives, including those of Swedish Ambassador Harold Edlestam and victims of junta torture camps...
...Mortinier J. Adler...
...The Paideia Proposal: An Educational Manifesto...
...Could a fragmented and disjointed planning effort produce . . . the desired effect on decisionmaking in Hanoi...
...P. K. Jerry Wurf: Labor’s Last Angry Man...
...Scribner’s, $ I Y. 95...
...From Nixon’s 1970 directive to organizea military coupd’etat to Jeane Kirkpatrick’s recent praise of General August Pinochet’s policies, Chavkin carefully traces the U.S...
...David 0. Sears Jack Citrin...
...Chatham House, $15...
...Proposition 13 and the other property tax revolts it spawned have been subjected to very little serious scrutiny...
...et al...
...A Jew who grew up in rural Georgia, Abram was a prominent civil rights advocate who argued the reapportionment case before the Supreme Court that resulted in the “oneman, one vote” decision...
...The Day is Short...
...White’s study struggles mightily with the parad6xes of Warren’s career...
...Morris B. Abram...
...Cities get government aid...
...Roger Morris...
...Oxford, $25...
...There’s some truth to Savas’s claim that certain government servicesgarbage collection, for examplecan be handled more efficiently by private contractors...
...All these are evident here...
...This short, impassioned plea to improve public schools zeroes in on the two main culprits of their decliningquality: poorly trained, incompetent teachers and a gradual whittling away of academic standards...
...Roger Lincoln Shinn...
...But Adler’s passion is refreshing, and his belief that the decline of our public schools undermines democracy is a warning that can’t be sounded often enough...
...Playboy Press...
...W. This Is Judy Woodruff at the White House...
...The answer, by now at least, should be clear...
...His suggestions, while sensible, are not terribly useful...
...P. K. The Palestinians in Perspective...
...14.95...
...George Gruen...
...Norion...
...Michael Waldman Straight Talk About American Education...
...When Governments Collide...
...Houghron Mip fliti...
...Jacob Weisberg The Passive Judiciary: Prosecutorial Discretion and the Guilty Plea...
...Thedraft called for a slash in federal aid to cities and offered this sophisticated logic: Cities decline...
...Unfortunately, much of it is outdated in the wake of the Israeli occupation of Lebanon...
...13.95...
...on another it’s a highly personal and introspective tale, as Abram recounts his extraordinary recovery from acute leukemia...
...government’s lack of concern for human rights in Chile...
...Randoni House, $15...
...Unfortunately, he fails to bring anything resemblinga critical eye to the activitiesof Wurfs union...
...Thies’s exhaustive academic study, while a bit arcane for the general reader, is a good scholarly review of U.S...
...3.50...
...Goldstein makes a good case for hisargument that judges have given prosecutors too much discretion in reducing charges, granting defendants immunity, and offering plea bargains...
...The former chiefjustice of the Supreme Court was a hardnosed district attorney who later championed rights for criminal defendants...
...On one level this is a story of a man’s political education...
...If he were, his book would be much more helpful...
...Kim McQuaid...
...The book is a litany of environmental disasters from water pollution to solid waste, pesticides, and herbicides...
...Hearst, $18.50...
...A thorough and openminded assessment of Wurf and the controversial rise of municipal unionism still remains to be done...
...Harcouri Brace Jovanovich...
...Atheneum...
...David Jonathan Cohen Elephants in the Cottonfields: Ronald Reagan and the New Republican South...
...Forest Reinhardt American Assassins: The Darker Side of Politics...
...To hiscredit, Goulden doesn’t ignore the unpleasant sides of Wurfs character...
...The author achieved some notoriety recently as the unfortunate official who wrote an HUD draft report that was received at the recent mayors’conference aboutas.warmly as an Ed Koch speech at a 4-H clubinupstateNew York...
...Phil Keisling Earl Warren: A Public Life...
...Lj,le Cron.lej, My Harvard, My Yale...
...This biography ofthe former president of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees is a disappointment...
...Tumultuous Years:The Presidency of Harry S. Truman 1949-1953...
...he asks...
...Harper and Row, $16.95...
...Dan Weil Privatizing the Public Sector...
...But his main point still comes through clearly: that the quick and devastatingAmericanintervention killed any chance Allende might have had to make his socialist policies work and that his ouster should be viewed as one of the fiascos of American foreign policy...
...But Savas never hides his monomaniacal hatred for government and it destroys his credibility...
...14.95...
...His solution consists largely of an abolition of the tracking system and the institution of a basic education approach for all students regardless of their abilities...
...Particularly worthwhile are his descriptions of John Kennedy’s “Southern Strategy”Abram helped free Martin Luther King from jail on the eve of the 1960 election-and his rocky relationship with Carter, whom Abram had never even heard of during the reapportionment and civil rights battles that rocked their state in the sixties...
...But such books often are characterized by a tendency to indulge in petty criticism for criticism’s sake, by overly long treatments of unimportant events that are meaningful to only a few people, and by a general superficiality...
...Joseph C. Goulden...
...Univ...
...G. Edward While...
...Lponard MoslejJ...
...David Schellhase...
...E. S. Savas...
...Prin.ceton, $18.50...
...Regenstein doesn’t tell us: he isn’t very interested in the arcane bureaucratic processes that lead to the continuing use of all those pesticides, or in what he rightly calls the “byzantine world of federal regulations...
...Judy Woodruff...
...Roberi J . Donovan...
...Addison- Wesley, $12.95...
...Adler is a bit naive...
...I ever knew...
...Haig: The General’s Progress...
...Everest, $13.95...
...Morrow, $17...
...Kathy Maxa...
...Harcourt Brace Jovanovich...
...Media Unbound: The Impact of Television Journalism on the Public...
...This anthology of six essays on the historical background and political significance of, the Palestinian Nationalist Movement offers some useful background to a complicated subject...
...of California, $8.95...
...Theodore M. Black...
...for example, while the belief in every child’s ability is a d m i r a b l e , t h e failure to give up on a few incorrigible students and remove them from the classroom can ruin the educational experience for everyone else...
...Macmillan, $6.95...
...Harvard...
...failed to force North Vietnam to end the war, however, are hardly surprising...
...The Murder of Chile...
...P. K. Marshall: A Hero for Our Times...
...James W. Clarke...
...Abraham Colrlsrein...
...Diana DuBois...
...Big Business and Presidential Power: From FDR to Reagan...
...military and diplomatic strategy in Vietnam between 1964 and 1968...
...Jnstitute of Human Relations Press...
...Chavkin paints a gruesome portrait of the state of Chile under the junta...
...Regenstein, vice president of the Fund for Animals, has a healthy contempt for at least two species: the corporate crooks and the torpid bureaucrats...
...They’re mostly for small, quiet choices (avoid consumer pesticides, eat low on the food chain), or for nebulously defined political change (“pressure the bureaucratic and political establishment, and persuade our leaders to do what is in their power to safeguard the public...
Vol. 14 • September 1982 • No. 7
