POLITICAL BOOKNOTES
POLITICAL BOOKNOTES Aftermath: A Soldier's Return From Vietnam. Frederick C. Downs Jr. Norton, $12.95. This is a sequel to The Killing Zone, Downs's 1978 account of the perils of fighting and...
...drives home the point that the movement has evolved into a centralized, sometimes dogmatic interest group, indistinguishable in most respects from any other interest groups...
...Then he spent the night adapting that explanation for his sixth-graders...
...Hispanics have annexed a part of Texas to form their own country...
...William Fellner, ed...
...Schocken Press, $12.95...
...Jamie Love The Feminist Challenge...
...As for the possibility of his capturing the national mood again, it seems unlikely because his timing is off...
...Wilson is a novelist of no great gifts, plainspoken without being eloquent...
...Generations of lobbyists have squabbled over how much each of these industries should be allowed into the other's business, and Congress is actively considering the question again now...
...After all, as Bouchier points out, the most revolutionary impact of the movement in the sixties was nonlegislative...
...And Washington, D.C., has melted into the ocean...
...What Sloan Wilson wants to talk about this time around is the gentle collapse of the mighty fortress that was Tom Rath's world in the fifties—Fairfield County, Rockefeller Center, and all that they implied...
...Aftermath is a sensitively chronicled diary that details Downs's struggle to survive in the terrifying limbo of a VA hospital...
...Useem offers interesting statistics and useful cocktail-party facts, but the grand theory of the "inner circle" simply isn't the revelation you're led to believe it will be...
...As a student teacher, he was given the boot from a New York public school for deviating from the rules...
...Trade Representative...
...people were compelled to view women differently simply because a great number of women insisted that it be so...
...Of particular use, both to incumbents seeking realworld solutions and to the public longing to appease its dread of this growing problem, are the concluding chapters, which compare regulatory approaches and highlight the ones that work...
...The novel takes place in 1963 but its mood is closer to 1970—was anybody in the early sixties using the phrase, "midlife crisis, " as one character does here?—and by 1984 the country has played out the theme of selfexpression and moved on to other obsessions...
...The inner circle, says the author, arose in response to adversity such as government regulation in the U.S...
...The AEI view is pragmatic and pessimistic...
...It looms like a vast desert between the fertile economic and political analysis that opens and closes the book...
...Grottlesex...
...He constructed a set of boxes inside boxes...
...The book is another call for a national industrial policy, but it reads more like a shopping list of failures and successes than an economic analysis...
...He dwells instead on the classroom, where sparks can still ignite when a teacher, in Kohl's words, helps his students "use [their] strengths to meet their own needs ?' It is heartening to know that small islands of such humanity and commitment can still exist, despite the determined efforts of our public schools to stamp them out...
...The challenge to liberals is to come up with something better...
...Dutton, $17.95...
...Yet Wohl remains convinced that the medical-industrial complex must be an "integral part" of any future cost-effective health-care system...
...Now people don't conform anymore, kids take drugs, sex is fun, self-employment is preferable to big-organization employment...
...Its suburban hero, Tom Rath, became the emblem of the burned-out World War II veteran-turned-corporate soldier...
...Keeping prices stable is more important than keeping people working...
...Harper & Row, $13.95...
...is a renaissance of the small consciousness-raising groups (the feminist version of de Tocqueville's town meeting...
...Nicholas Lemann The Medical-Industrial Complex...
...Dallek presents a fine chronology of Reagan's policy victories and defeats, from his governorship to 1983, but when he offers a psychological explanation for Reagan's choice of issues (son of an alcoholic, he developed a "horror of being in a helpless condition, beholden to someone else for survival"), he is both unconvincing and distracting...
...this has absolutely nothing to do with the nation's high medical bills ." Wohl does, however, provide a revealing look at the financial umbilical cord between for-profit medical chains—like Humana Inc...
...Martin Mayer...
...American Enterprise Institute...
...James P. Lester, Ann O'M...
...Unfortunately, that's about as far as Lodge takes it...
...Paul D. Clastris The Politics of Waste Management...
...After trying a private school, however, Kohl became disenchanted with it as well...
...Useem argues that in recent years an "inner circle" of corporate bigwigs has developed in the U.S...
...Kohl's creativity in the classroom was not always appreciated...
...and Hospital Corporation of America—and medical supply giants such as Upjohn and Johnson & Johnson...
...Mairi N Morrison The American Disease...
...Bouchier asks a compelling question: how can modern feminism recapture the spirit and commitment of the 1960s before it expires as a "form of politics which has been outdated by events ." This carefully crafted analysis of the feminist movement in Britain and the U.S...
...Elizabeth Leiman Warday...
...Markets aren't perfect, and the "invisible hand" won't cure everything...
...Wohl, a doctor at Stanford Medical Center, examines America's new, for-profit healthcare chains of hospitals, nursing homes, and "free-standing ambulatory-care centers" and finds that their record so far is one of rampant overutilization, overcharging, wild profits, and mediocre care...
...The book is worth reading for this anatomy lesson alone...
...Wohl's insistence that although "many doctors do earn a large sum of money...
...Michael Useem...
...Ronald Brownstein Ronald Reagan: The Politics of Symbolism...
...Mayer examines these machinations intelligently and engagingly, with a special focus on the computer and communications advances that are breaking down the barriers between the industries...
...Kohl does not belabor the enemy...
...Lynne Randolph The Inner Circle: Large Corporations and the Rise of Business Political Activity in the U.S...
...For most readers, Mayer's extended discussion of how technology is changing the way banks move money around-=`the plumbing of the banking system," as one Fed official calls it—will be parchingly dull...
...The last box, the empty one, was zero...
...and Great Britain...
...Whitely Strieber, James Kunetka...
...and the U.K...
...For those of us who watched "The Day After" and wondered what possibly could have happened in the ensuing years, Warday covers it...
...Published by a conservative Washington, D.C., think-tank, the essays decisively reject the claims of supply-siders and other right-wing romantics that inflation can be reduced without the pain of unemployment, bankruptcies, and the like...
...The original Man in the Gray Flannel Suit was one of those novels that achieves fame more as sociology than as art...
...In the final chapter, Lodge does provide his point-by-point plan for change, including such ideas as increasing the power of the U.S...
...By the end, he's sinking into a mellow, bittersweet old age in Florida, his wife running exercise classes in the living room...
...Herbert Kohl...
...Sloan Wilson...
...Particularly timely is Mayer's analysis of the ongoing international debt crisis, and the Alice-in-Wonderland accounting that allows banks to book profits on loans they make to help debtors pay back overdue interest on previous loans...
...He returned to the public schools, stifling bureaucracy and all...
...Stanley Wohl...
...Kurt Eichenwald Essays in Contemporary Economic Problems, 1983-1984 Edition: Disinflation...
...But for Tom, who when he bought the program bought it out of fear and not belief, the culture's growing acceptance of its fallibility is mostly a blessing...
...In fact, it was the title more than the character that caught the imagination of the fifties, and today one reads the original feeling that its virtue is as a snapshot of one moment in American life without being so compelled by the characters as to wonder what will become of them...
...His sad epiphany comes as he is having his wedding photograph taken by a crusty WWII vet who crossexamines him on the number of women and children he has tortured and killed...
...Good stuff...
...Marxists might refer to this as the "reserve army of unemployed" approach to inflation control...
...More important, so what...
...The dollar is practically worthless,, New York is a city of wild dogs and salvagers, euthanasia is fully accepted (even by the Catholic Church) and commonly practiced on victims of radiation poisoning, and mysterious contagious diseases have reduced the population by nearly half...
...Wilson, alas, presents them as they actually must be, mundane and desolate...
...They find that America has become a groping Third World country while the new superpowers, Japan and Britain, hold the reins...
...Inner circle members are easily recognizable: They generally sit on several corporate boards, are of "upper-class" backgrounds, and attended St...
...and the "labor challenge" in England, and is responsible for a "rising corporate activism," which among other things helped elect Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher...
...Duke University, $8.95...
...The AEI counsels the opposite approach: When the economy slows down, sit tight...
...The themes of Lodge's book are familiar to Monthly readers: government, business, and labor must cooperate for America to regain its competitive edge, politicians have resigned themselves to the whims of overly powerful special interests that undercut or stifle the national interest, and the country needs a return to a sense of community and national purpose...
...This is a sequel to The Killing Zone, Downs's 1978 account of the perils of fighting and dying in the Vietnam war, which has become a classic of wartime narrative...
...David Bouchier...
...In other words, it's a neoconservative's nightmare...
...There is indeed increasing agreement that Keynesians have been too cavalier about inflation, but this does not mean the the AEI folks are right...
...But this is the age of the sequel, so now we have The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit II, which takes Tom Rath through service in the last month of the Kennedy administration, an affair, and a divorce...
...But traditional Keynesian policies that try to keep people working by jacking up inflation are not effective enough to justify their costs...
...California, unaffected by fallout, develops a xenophobia so strong its border patrols shoot "illegal American immigrants" on sight...
...Their favored policies— shifting the tax burden from the owners of capital to consumers, and a higher toleration of unemployment—are harshest on those at the bottom...
...When one of Kohl's sixth-grade students asked him what a number really was, Kohl remembered how a college professor had explained John von Neuman's derivation of natural numbers...
...It ends with his bittersweet return to Indiana, a normal place that is for him now robbed of normality...
...Why the reader should share his conviction is not explained...
...Harmony Books, $14.95...
...Robert Dallek...
...The hope for feminism, as Bouchier sees it...
...Bruce Piasecki The Money Bazaars: Understanding the Banking Revolution Around Us...
...As a cause," he says, "women's liberation is as deep, as wide, and as fundamental to human progress as the labor movement ever was...
...Five years after a Soviet-American nuclear exchange, Strieber and Kunetka (as themselves) take a fictional tour of a transformed United States to report on the state of the union...
...Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, $15.95...
...Although dreadfully academic at times, the text contains sustained, well-documented studies of the key issues in the field: from the bureaucratic art of citing needed, though controversial, toxic waste destruction facilities, to the role of the public in keeping the EPA vigilant...
...Just one year after young Lieutenant Frederick Downs loses his arm and the full use of his legs to a landmine in a Vietnamese jungle, he realizes that the American people do not love him for his sacrifices...
...Oxford University Press, $12.95...
...Kay L. Gunderson Growing Minds: On Becoming a Teacher...
...Women do have common interests, but they are not necessarily abortion, day care, or comparable worth...
...Susanne Pari...
...Critics of the medical establishment may find equally dissatisfying Dr...
...In Europe there was the Hundred Years War: in Congress there is the interminable struggle between brokers, bankers, and insurers...
...This is a collection of ten essays on the costs and consequences of the Reagan administration's efforts to reduce inflation...
...Bowman, eds...
...Whose childhood didn't contribute to adult values...
...John Updike can make station-wagon adultery and too many martinis seem like the stuff of literature...
...Harvard University Press, $14.95...
...Arbor House, $16.95...
...Lodge, a professor at Harvard Business School, is strong on diagnosis of the disease in the American economic system, but weak on his recommendations for treatment...
...Nicholas Goldberg The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit II...
...George C. Lodge...
...Knopf $18.95...
...Unfortunately, the plan ignores the most significant symptoms that Lodge described, such as the adversarial nature of American society, the country's lack of leadership, and the gridlocked policies caused by the politics of special interests...
Vol. 16 • May 1984 • No. 4
