Political Book Notes
political book notes Among Those Present: A Reporter’s View of Twenty-five Years in Washington. Nancy Dickerson. Random House, $8.95. An American Company: The Tragedy of United Fruit. Thomas P....
...Running for President...
...The movement’s, and Rich’s, great sensible point is that men have consistently failed to understand women and have as a result been cruel to them...
...Our preeminent psycho-biographer takes on the Secretary of State, with mixed results...
...Scribner’s, $1 5. Swanberg, previously notable as the biographer of press lords (Luce, Hearst, Pulitzer), here turns his attention to the perennial Socialist Party presidential candidate and fighter for unpopular causes...
...The Challenge of the American Revolution...
...Democratic Promise: The Populist Movement in America...
...Stephen Hess...
...Adrienne Rich...
...Naval Institute, $1 6.95...
...Liveright, $7.95...
...This is an expansion of Sheehan’s earlier article in Foreign Policy, which caused a tremendous fuss because it was full of unauthorized leaks and so forth-but it now turns out Sheehan got his material from a State Department official who thought it would be okay to release it...
...Mafioso: A Hist~ry of the Mafia from Its Origins to the Present Day...
...Our Blood: Prophecies and Discourses on Sexual Politics...
...F. Stickley Co., $10.50...
...Nuclear Power: The Unviable Option-A Critical Look at Our Energy Alternatives...
...Crowell, $9.95...
...there’s very little research, and the whole account is disjointed and geared toward making McCann and his friends in the company sound good and their opponents evil...
...Norton, $10.95...
...Colen...
...Richard J. Walton...
...Andrea Dworkin...
...Norton, $8.95...
...Dorothy Rabinowitz...
...Arthur Macy Cox...
...Volunteers, One and I ’I...
...The Seven Sisters and the Failure of Women’s Education...
...Basic, $10.95...
...Liva Baker...
...Dorothy Butler Gilliam...
...Because of Thomas’ endless career and wide associations, his biography is a tour of the Old Left, through myriad crises and factions, for most of this century...
...The Making of an Assassin: The Life of James Earl Ray...
...Sybil Leek, Bert R. Sugar...
...Karen Ann Quinlan: Dying in the Age of Eternal Life...
...Bruce Bliven, Jr...
...Pocket Books, $150...
...Reader’s Digest: $7.95...
...Brookdale/ Walker, $7.95...
...If we are to celebrate their achievement...
...Viking, $12.95...
...Israelis, and Kissinger: A Secret American Diplomacy in the Edward RF...
...Little, Brown, $8.95...
...Joseph Buttinger...
...The Eccentric Tradition: American Diplomacy in the Far East...
...If all this seems to contradict the broad range of experience, well, remember, this is a book whose aim is to push outwards the frontiers of our thoughts...
...Portrait of a Cold Warrior...
...Macmillan, $9.95...
...Still, it’s an interesting book, and its chief idea-that the key to Kissinger is his foreign birth and subsequent Americanization-makes sense...
...The Greatest Battle...
...Little, Brown, $17.95...
...An excerpt appears in this issue of The Washington Monthly...
...Fly Me...
...Harper & Row, $6.95...
...Public Persons...
...Sansom, a former official in the Environmental Protection Agency, says the age of industry as the environment’s chief enemy is over...
...There is much earnest wringing of all possible meaning out of every scrap of evidence, but the record is fairly familiar to begin with...
...Robert Br...
...Capitalism Can Survive in a No-Growth Economy...
...For what she does want to say about motherhood, too, Rich has marshalled a great deal of evidence impressively...
...City Lives...
...An amusing account of the adventures of our first ambassadors to the courts of Europe...
...Ramparts Press...
...Walter Lippmann, Gilbert A. Harrison, ed...
...Meade Arble...
...industrial pollution is coming under control...
...This biography of Dorothy Schiff, the publisher of the New York Post, is tasteless, sychophantic, and totally absorbing...
...Developing the ICBM: A Study in Bureaucratic Politics...
...Stephen Barrett, M.D., Gilda Knight, eds...
...Potter...
...Albert Rosenfeld...
...Organizing the Presidency...
...Paul Robeson-All American...
...Gaia Servadio...
...his considerable elitism shines through on every page, and people should remember that he was a man who believed that “the main difficulty in democratic society arises out of the increasing practice of liberty...
...The former deputy administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency says he wrote this book in airports and hotel rooms, and it shows it...
...An interesting book, and, by the way, the kind that creates a powerful impression that its author wouldn’t refuse a call back into the government from some high-ranking reader...
...Freedom Spent...
...It could, in fact, make a great book-but this isn’t it...
...NO: Reshaping the International Order, A Report to the Qub of Rome...
...Thomas P. McCann...
...Simon & Schuster, $10.95...
...The Phone Book: What the Telephone Company Would Rather You Not Know...
...Thus it is not infused with the kind of personal understanding that the author’s friendship with Mrs...
...There are passages, in fact, extolling the joys of motherhood and refuting the most extreme feminist theorists on the subject...
...Grosset & Dunlap...
...Richard Harris...
...I’m Radcliffe...
...What is most interesting is what barely filters through, like the way United Fruit virtually ran parts of Central America for a time...
...Norman Thomas: The Last Idealist...
...Color Me Flo: My Hard Life and Good Times...
...The Economy: Old Myths and New Realities...
...Vietnam: The Unforgettable Tragedy...
...Swanberg...
...Holt, Rinehart &Winston, $12.95/7.95...
...Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, $9.95...
...For all his good qualities, Lippmann was a near-perfect embodiment of the unattractive aspects of the liberal Progressive tradition...
...Bruce Mazlish...
...Basic Books, $10.95...
...Robert L. Sansom, Anchor, $8.95...
...Rich, a National Book Award-winning poet, has chosen a far less fat target than Brownmiller did, for while everybody agrees rape is bad, the case against motherhood (it “must be destroyed,” Rich writes) is less open-and-shut...
...The Dynamics of Detente...
...The Healers: The Rise of the Medical Establishment...
...Walter W. Heller...
...Of Woman Born-Motherhood As Experience and Institution...
...Men, Money and Magic...
...Norton, $8.95...
...The story of United Fruit is a fascinating one, and it touches on quite a few important themes in American business: entrepreneurship, the rise of management, corporate imperialism, the growth of public relations, and 60s stock manipulations and takeovers...
...Joseph Burkholder Smith...
...Princeton, $13.50...
...Atheneum, $8.95...
...Macmillan, $12.95...
...Dutton, $10/4.95...
...Peggy Lamson...
...Columbia, $15...
...it should be, I suggest, by continuing to think things need not be the way they are...
...What deeper insight comes out, and indeed quite a bit does, comes out on its own, with no pushing by Swanberg...
...Scribners...
...The Assassination Chain...
...Edmund S. Morgan...
...Crown, $8.95...
...It is clear that motherhood as traditionally perceived has been used to do bad things to women...
...Henry S. Marcus, et al...
...Oxford, $19.50...
...An important book by the author of American Slavery, American Reedom He concludes, “The Founding Fathers of those days deserve the esteem that has been heaped upon them...
...The author, who was Pat Moynihan’s deputy in the early days of the Nixon presidency, has written a thoughtful book recommending that the President stop trying to manage everything and give more emphasis to “a relatively small number of highly significant political decisions-among them, setting national priorities, which he does through the budget and his legislative proposals, and devising policy to ensure the security of the country, with special attention to those situations that could involve the nation in war...
...Pro-longevity...
...The Health Robbers...
...Putnam, $1 1.95...
...Houghton Mifflin, $8.95...
...Knopf, $10...
...James M. Merrill...
...Sheehan...
...The New American Dream Machine...
...John R Quarles, Jr...
...At the same time, Rich carries with her much of the unfortunate excess baggage of the women’s movement...
...A Sailor’s Admiral: A Biography of William F. Halsey...
...George McMillan...
...The author is a member of the busgess and financial news staff of The New York Times...
...Lawrence Goodwyn...
...Herbert I. Schiller...
...Communication and Cultural Domination...
...Edmund Beard...
...Horizon, $8.95...
...Flo Kennedy...
...Excellent reporting of Carter’s campaign for the Democratic nomination by the Washington bureau chief of Newsday...
...Whatever her faults and whatever the author’s limitations, Dorothy Schiff has been involved with some of the more interesting people and events of our time...
...Robert A. Hart...
...Knopf, $8.95...
...but having seen this, Rich falls into the same pitfall as regards men, and portrays them with little understanding...
...Houghton Mifflin, $12.50...
...ca don’t come together well...
...They had the imagination to think that things need not be the way they were, and they had the nerve to act as their imaginations directed...
...Henry Wallace, Harry Truman, and the Cold War...
...Mazlish‘s tentative stabs at grand points about Ameri...
...The Long Tunnel: A Coal Miner’s Journal...
...Roger Baldwin, Founder of the American Civil Liberties Union...
...Isadore Barmash...
...MIT, $17.50...
...Jan Tinbergen, ed...
...Its women, more often than not, are in the most unusually degraded position women can be in...
...Ronald J. Glasser, MD...
...Reader’s Digest, $8.95...
...and the happy nuclear family is, in Rich‘s world, simply nonexistent...
...International A r t s and Sciences Press, $7.95...
...New Republic, $8.95...
...Cleaning Up America: An Insider’s View of the Environmental Protection Agency...
...International Arts and Sciences Press, $17.50...
...Well, it turns out Rich isn’t against motherhood per se, but rather against the way men have used it as a way of keeping women away from the world‘s business, their creativity stifled and their feelings of guilt and inferiority exacerbated...
...It’s an interesting and honest book,but hastily done and imprisoned by events to the exclusion of any real analysis...
...Prentice-Hall, $79514.95...
...Thomas himself was rather atypical-always genteel and kind, not given to internecine warfare, staunchly anti-communist and pro-civil liberties, and strangest of all, happily resident in a Long Island estate and always treated kindly by people in power...
...The War Lords: Military Commanders of the Twentieth Century...
...Beyond the Presidency: The Residues of Power...
...Field Marshal Sir Michael Carver, ed...
...Nimitz...
...Regnery, $7.95...
...The problem for the next 25 years, Sansom says, is “lifestyle pollution,” things like too many cars and suburbs, so that what we all need is to live a little more simply and to grow a little less quickly...
...Norton, $12.95...
...For the Good of the Company...
...Werner Sombart...
...This book seems to be based entirely on documentary sources except for a prologue that tells of the author’s one meeting with Churchill...
...Perhaps this book wiU help to demystify Lippmann, who is now one of the great uncriticizable figures of the century...
...James Wagenvoord...
...One does not accomplish that by dwelling on what is good in the present system, and if by that omission some balance is lost, it seems to have been cast aside on purpose...
...Norton, $8.95/$2.95...
...John J. Berger...
...Why Is There No Socialism in the United States...
...Herbert N. Woodward...
...Erich Fromm...
...Friends and Lovers...
...Marie B. Hecht...
...The Virgin Diplomats...
...Nash, $7.95...
...There’s no escaping the comparison of this book to Susan Brownmiller’s Rape: both are heavily researched historical/sociological examinations of institutions through which women have been, the authors hope to prove, exploited through the ages...
...John Stuart Mill and Representative Government...
...Nancy Seifer...
...McGraw-Hill, $12.50...
...Knopf, $8.95...
...This book is written a lot like Swanberg’s other biographies, in exhaustive narrative detail without excessive probing or analysis...
...its men are as evil as men can possibly be...
...Harper and Row, $7.95...
...This is a radical book, and it sees things in extremes...
...Roosevelt made possible in Eleanor and Franklin...
...Nobody Speaks for Me...
...Federal Port Policy in the United States...
...A good many of the psychoanalytic insights are just dressed-up common sense...
...Brookings, $10.95...
...Jeffrey Potter...
...A fascinating, though not very well written, history of an actual company, the McCrory Corporation, and of the personalities and economic forces, large and small, that have shaped it...
...Roosevelt and Churchill-1939-1941...
...The Arabs, History of Middle East...
...No doubt other such leaks go on aU the time, and no doubt the regular Kissinger press corps is, alas, much better at selfcensorship than Sheehan is...
...To Have or To Be...
...Kissinger: The European Mind in American Policy...
...Stein &Day, $10...
...A collection of nearly 60 years of Lippmann’s short ’writings on various famous people, skillfully and honestly edited by the former editor of The New Republic...
...Dennis F. Thompson...
...Littlq, Brown, $12.95...
...Joseph P. Lash...
...New Lives: Survivors of the Holocaust Living in America...
...Elmer Bendiner...
...Given that, in the year 2000 will begin an era of pollution-free growth, a sort of golden age, says Sansom...
...Martin Schram...
...McCann, a former United Fruit vice-president, has written more of an autobiography than a history...
...Still it tells a great story-the sub-title “The Partnership That Saved the West” seems quite accurate-and is a valuable reminder that there was a time when we needed a strong president...
...Corwin, $9.95...
...Inside information, well-written and put together, on Kissinger’s shuttle diplomacy in the Mideast...
...J. Edward Hyde...
...John Duffy...
Vol. 8 • October 1976 • No. 8
