Books read January through December 1974
| Author | Mitchell, George |
|---|---|
| Publication | Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1973 |
| Number of Pages | 242 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Society |
| Keywords | Racism; Young adult |
| When Read | January 1974 |
Mitchell (white) interviews six young blacks aged 14-17 on youth, race, poverty, family, love, the future, society. His questions are relatively neutral, non-leading.
The young people lead lives of poverty and ignorance. They endure and participate in all kinds of unnecessary violence. Each is alienated but full of youthful expectation that he will definitely rise above all this when he grows up. They are very mature on matters of sex but not particularly so on love. Good race and poverty consciousness but poor analysis of experience and no knowledge of larger nationwide affairs (with exceptions.) Each child has a distinct personality, some very appealing, others overly warped.
A good book for white youth or adults. Gives the inside view.
I looked on the Internet and found that Mitchell, born in 1944, got interested in the music of the Black musicians in Georgia and began recording them. He built a career in music recording, photography, and writing. He appears to be one of those guys who followed his heart, as it were, carving out a life for himself doing things that were important to him.
This book does not appear to be in print any more but used copies are listed for sale through Amazon. There was no description and no review of the book so I copied my notes into a review, with some editing, so that there would be something to describe the book.
When I read this book I was a student in library school, taking a course taught by Professor Thomasson in young adult literature. Each of us students could read any books we wished and I chose this as my first one because it was about young adults and of interest to young adults and also looked interesting to me.
Ms. Thomasson recommended that we students create notes for each book we read and write the notes for each book on a separate 3x5 index card. She said we would be able to use these cards when we became librarians to help find books that would appeal to our patrons. These notes on this book are the very first book notes I wrote.
Writing notes turned out to be very beneficial to me. I never used the cards in my library career but I use them all the time in my reading career - to check whether I have read something, to see what I thought of it, to refresh my memory, to preserve reading experience that would otherwise quickly float away and be lost to me forever. Together with my diary (started earlier in 1971) the book notes help to keep my biography alive.
I have graduated from writing notes by hand on 3x5 inch index cards to writing them in XML on my computers. I made the switch in 2011 but should have made it much earlier. The 3x5 inch cards were my last true hand-written records and I preserved the practice long past when I should have changed largely for reasons of nostalgia. But I have gone back, starting in 2011, and transcribed all of the cards to XML, often adding new notes about the individual books. My handling of the content and the notes has varied over time - sometimes making exact transcriptions that fixed spelling or grammar but nothing else, and sometimes making more extensive, though still limited, edits. What I chose to do had something to do with my mood in each session, but almost all of the changes I made were for readability, not content. It was only in a few cases when I thought I had written something particularly stupid that I revised the content.
The transcription was a long process starting six years ago in 2011 and now finished with the transcription of this card. It was an interesting journey into the past and a revisit and recapture of long forgotten books.
| Author | ter Haar, Jaap |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Dutch |
| Translators | Mearns, Martha |
| Publication | New York: Seymour Lawrence Book, Delacorte Press, 1971 |
| Copyright Date | 1966 |
| Number of Pages | 152 |
| Extras | illustrations |
| Genres | Fiction; History |
| Keywords | World War II; Soviet Union; Young adult |
| When Read | January 1974 |
12 year old Russian boy survives the siege of Leningrad. He learns about courage, death, and compassion for all human beings including the enemy. Mentions several moral dilemmas but sticks with one for simplicity of comprehension and development.
But for ages 9-14? Reasonably good treatment of Russia and socialism - nothing developed about that.
Very serious for its age level.
I chose to read this book for my young adult literature class because of my interest in the subject. Looking at Amazon, I see that two reviewers have indeed read this book to the children in their elementary or middle school classrooms, reporting that the children were positive about it.
| Author | Graham, Robin Lee |
|---|---|
| Author | Gill, Derek L.T. |
| Publication | New York: Harper and Row, 1972 |
| Number of Pages | 199 |
| Extras | photos |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Autobiography |
| Keywords | Sailing; Young adult |
| When Read | January 1974 |
"The true story of a 16 year old boy who sailed his 24 foot sloop around the world to discover adventure and love."
Excellent growing up story, love story, sea story.
Graham is an attractive character - open, innocent, brave, ecology minded, ready to experience all the beauty of life. On the other hand though he takes flight from the down to earth mundane and sometimes ugly reality of social life. He cannot come to grips with the way 200 million other Americans live. Finally continues his voyage in America by retiring to a mountaintop to commune with his family, nature, and God.
(Makes a crack about Maoism at Stanford.)
There aren't many parents of sixteen year old boys who would support their sons in dropping out of high school and engaging in a solo, round the world, sailing adventure. When he got back, with pregnant wife, he and his wife enrolled at Stanford University, but college was not for him and he dropped out again. He moved to Montana where it is said that he still lives and works as a home builder and Christian activist.
Sailing has always been one of my fantasies. I once built my own little wooden boat, but mostly I've just read all the accounts by people like Graham, Robert Manry, Joshua Slocum, and Sir Francis Chichester (whose book Gypsy Moth Circles the World, I must have read before starting my book cards.)
| Author | McGovern, George S. |
|---|---|
| Author | Gottridge, Leonard F. |
| Publication | Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1972 |
| Number of Pages | 383 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | Labor |
| When Read | January 1974 |
A straightforward liberal history of the 1913-14 strike in the coalfields of southern Colorado. Includes some info on mining, industry, state and local government, the strike, the Ludlow massacre, guerrilla war, federal reaction, capitalists (including J.D. Rockefeller Jr.), press reaction, trials of leaders, later reforms, and unionization in the mines.
McGovern shows himself to be pro-labor but without a consistent working class perspective. His view is a sort of "let's get together and work this thing out by avoiding violence and giving due recognition to the rights, needs, and points of view of both sides." He considers a man to be guilty only if his subjective intentions were bad, hence he exonerates everyone.
M's politics are prominent but not up-front. He makes no historical or political analysis of the general social phenomena of which Colorado was an instance. There is no analysis of capitalism, unionism, class, liberalism, socialism, etc.
It is unclear what Guttridge's contribution was.
I read this book because I had never seen a book by an American presidential candidate about a labor struggle, and because I had been a supporter of McGovern in the 1972 election that the criminal Richard Nixon won. My comment talks about what I took to be the limits of McGovern's sympathy for labor, but I am and was impressed that he would write such a book with such a theme, and publish it in an election year no less. McGovern was a student of labor history and wrote a PhD dissertation "The Colorado Coal Strike, 1913-1914" in 1953. I assume this book was based on his earlier research.
My respect for McGovern has only grown over the years as I learned more about him.
| Author | Meriwether, Louise |
|---|---|
| Publication | Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1970 |
| Number of Pages | 208 |
| Extras | Forward by James Baldwin |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Racism; Young adult |
| When Read | February 1974 |
Inside story of Harlem, 1930's, related by a 12-13 year old girl. She must deal with poverty, the law, ignorance, "relief", school, and sexism.
Well written with an excellent feel for the people. There is no implicit escapism - no relief at the end - but there is considerable understanding of conditions in Harlem. The author's consciousness appears limited to poverty and racism. It is not a black nationalist book but neither is it particularly class conscious. Perhaps it is partly because the main characters and most people around them are entirely declassed.
M is well educated, working out the story in the Watts Writers' Workshop.
A good book for black or white, high school or older (younger if mature.) It captures its subject well.
This was only the fourth book card I wrote under the stimulus of Ms. Thomasson's young adult literature class, but I think it was the last one for which my main motivation was learning about young adult literature. Still, it was a book whose subject was interesting to me regardless of the age of the audience for which it was written.
Looking through the Amazon reviews I see that almost all of the 25 reviewers liked it a lot. Many read it when it came out in 1970 and read it again when it was made available again. Many were teenagers when they read it and many were black girls. One reader said that she read it at age 11 and now, at age 56, it's still her all time favorite book. Another said that this book made her a lifetime reader.
I read all 25 reviews. One reviewer out of the 25, and only one, said that the book examines Black / Jewish relationships "... in the form of tenant/landlord, student/teacher, customer/business owner and domestic/employer and in each, the black characters appear to be the victims." Apparently I missed that altogether and either the other 24 reviewers didn't notice it or they didn't think it worth mentioning in their reviews.
Looking further, I see that Harlem once housed the third largest Jewish community in the world, after Warsaw and the Lower East Side of New York. It's not surprising that the business owners, teachers, landlords and employers of domestic servants would be predominantly Jewish in a previously Jewish community where African-Americans were recent immigrants. So I don't see a clear reason to think that Meriwether was resentful of Jews in particular.
As of this writing, Meriwether appears to still be alive at age 94. She gave a video interview on July 24, 2014 that is available on YouTube. She looks pretty strong there.
| Author | Singer, Isaac Bashevis |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1969 |
| Copyright Date | 1963 |
| Number of Pages | 227 |
| Extras | Photographs by Roman Vishniac |
| Genres | Fiction; Short stories |
| Keywords | Poland; Jews |
| When Read | February 1974 |
A very fine book. Written in short story form, each piece is actually part of the whole. A record of Singer's growing up in 1908-18 Warsaw.
S shows great depth of feeling for poor and working people. While painting a fine portrait of Jewish life, he displays great sympathy for the non-Jews also. Singer seems a much greater writer than Chaim Potok. He also had a Hasidic upbringing - but compared to Potok it obviously meant much more, and his transcendence of that background was much deeper and better than Asher Lev's.
Singer is very philosophical. He cares about such questions as the existence of God, material or ideal world view, and the class character of society. He was, for a long period of his late youth and early adulthood, attracted to Spinoza.
Comparing Potok to Singer says nothing against Potok. If I said that Potok was not as great a writer as Tolstoy, that would still leave room for Potok to be a very great writer indeed. So too does the comparison with Singer. And now that I know that Potok was a rabbi, I have to revise my view that Singer's Hasidic upbringing meant more to him than Potok's. Had I as much sympathy for Potok's work as for Singer's, I probably wouldn't have made that judgment even if I hadn't known anything about Potok's background.
But that's all besides the main point which is that Singer was one of our great writers of short stories and of novels too. Although this was a book about growing up, and although I justified reading it as part of my young adult literature course, it really was an adult book and I won't mark it as "Young adult".
| Author | Taubman, William |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Coward-McCann Inc., 1967 |
| Number of Pages | 249 |
| Genres | Non-fiction |
| Keywords | Soviet Union |
| When Read | February 1974 |
Taubman spent one year at Moscow State University, the elite Soviet university at Lenin Hills. T is a Kennedy liberal intellectual, a very honest and objective reporter with concern for accuracy and an appreciation of sources of subjectivity.
The book is very worth reading. T reports widespread support for socialism and the Party but tremendous criticism of sloganeering, oversimplifying, false promising, censorship, fear of the West, and other Party policies and methods of work. He also shows that debate is much more open and frank than Americans are led to believe.
One gets the impression of a generation gap. An older generation with the experience of war, imperialism, the class struggle, the struggle for industrialization, and a younger generation without this experience. The older fears the West while the younger doesn't. To them, the study of socialism is not as high priority. They take it for granted.
One also gets an impression of considerable contradiction between intellectual and manual labor, but still much dedication to the ideal.
The students at Moscow State University were the children of high ranking people in the Party, government, or economy, or were top students at their high schools. I seem to recall that Taubman saw them as young people who were the beneficiaries of Communist Party rule and who were committed to it. They thought the USSR was a good society. They were not uncritical of the government but their criticism were of the constructive kind. They aimed to make CP rule better, not tear it down.
This was something of a surprise to Taubman and more so to his American readers, but it probably shouldn't have been. Similar attitudes would probably be found at elite universities in the U.S. and other countries. With some exceptions (e.g., North Korea?) every society has beneficiaries and supporters and what better place to find them than in the elite universities?
| Author | Anonymous |
|---|---|
| Publication | Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall Inc., 1972 |
| Copyright Date | 1967 |
| Number of Pages | 224 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| Keywords | Young adult |
| When Read | February 1974 |
A disturbing book. The diary of a 15 year old girl, alienated from the social situation in her high school, who is turned on to drugs - mainly acid [LSD] and grass [marijuana], but everything else too. She feels that the drugs make everything much better than it normally is, but she descends into a world of escapism, runaway life, and being taken advantage of everywhere. It is a good thing for teenagers to read, especially for describing the social milieu of high school "dopers". Most kids will not have such understanding and compassionate parents though.
For all that, she still feels she cannot speak freely to her parents, and feels that they do not listen.
[No separate comment]
According to the Wikipedia, by 2009 five million copies of this book had been sold and, because many were bought by libraries or passed around by individuals, the number of readers is thought to be larger. The book was almost universally praised when it was released as something that teenagers could relate to and that would show them why drug use and sex were dangerous for them. More recently however, some reviewers have criticized the book as not realistic.
When I read this book I accepted the original premise of its publication, that it was an edited version of a real girl's diary. Since then, this premise has been challenged and the work is described by its publisher as fiction. Different editions come out with different claims about what it is.
| Author | Potok, Chaim |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972 |
| Number of Pages | 369 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| Keywords | Jews; Young adult |
| When Read | February 1974 |
A good, but not great, novel of a young Hasidic Jew with a "gift" for art. His father "travels" for the Rebbe, setting up yeshivas and smuggling Hasids from Russia and cannot understand the frivolous and goyische path he considers Asher to have taken. Asher's mother Rivkeh is caught between the two, a martyr to both. Potok knows both art and Jewishness, however the religiosity of Asher is unfleshed and unconvincing. P regards the only true art as that which expresses the inner soul of the artist, regardless of the consequences. Creation is necessarily a tearing, painful process which hurts people - but it is justified if it achieves greatness.
There is a recognition by P of the artist's relationship to his background, culture, and tradition, but a denial of any relationship to class or political movement. This contradiction leads P to consider obsession with self as "art" and obsession with class or history as "propaganda".
The comment above is, of course, my 1970's obligatory political analysis of the story - something that would probably have caused Potok to say "Huh?"
Potok was a rabbi and a painter as well as a very successful novelist. His 1967 novel, The Chosen, is said to have sold 3.4 million copies, an extraordinary number.
| Author | Kosinski, Jerzy |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Inc., 1970 |
| Number of Pages | 140 |
| Genres | Fiction; Satire |
| When Read | February 1974 |
A satiric story of a simpleton's unwitting impact on the ruling class. Chance is a gardener in a house where he has always lived. He knows no living soul and all he has is gardening and TV. His mind is pure image, no substance. The hollowness of the ruling class sees great depth in what is really only a vacuum.
The book does have a class stance - it does not seem merely nihilistic - though it is anti-Soviet. Still it is a cynical book that could easily slip into nihilism.
In many ways it parallels The Good Soldier Schweik.
Young people can read this and will get something out of it. However the sexual overtones are not youngsters' views of life.
The last sentence of my comment above indicates that I read this as part of my young adult literature class (for which each student picked his own list of books.)
| Author | Galston, Arthur W. |
|---|---|
| Author | Savage, Jean S. |
| Publication | New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Co., 1973 |
| Number of Pages | 275 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Society |
| Keywords | China |
| When Read | February 1974 |
A good introduction by a leading plant physiologist who went to China after a tour of North Vietnam inspecting defoliant damage. Galston is sympathetic and critical, trying his best to describe both good and bad as it appeared to him without being swept away by cultural shock. His overall impression was very positive with a concluding chapter on "the group ethic" which he regards as the most important Chinese social development. He also has a good eye for picking up detail on everyday life and especially on education and workaday technology.
Galston spoke little Chinese and does not have the "feel" of the people given by Horn, Hinton, Myrdal, et. al. He gives a look which the average American would find relatively unbiased. An anti-communist would not be changed but might gain more respect for the Chinese achievement. I'd rate this book as supplementary to the others.
Galston is the author of Life Processes of Plants, which I read in 2005 when I was studying biology and had gotten interested in botany. He was a very accomplished and highly respected scientist.
This book is still in print. It garnered one star in the sole review of it on Amazon. The author of that review thought that Galston's portrayal of China was too positive and simplistic, seeing nothing of the upheaval and injustices of the Cultural Revolution.
I was alive and interested in China during the period of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. At the time, of course, I was highly sympathetic to the revolution. I didn't know about all of the injustices that were occurring and the trauma inflicted on intellectuals, professionals, and their families. To this day, I don't know whether my ignorance was due to willful blindness or to the fact that many of the stories of these injustices weren't fully revealed until later, after the death of Mao Tse-tung and the overthrow of the Gang of Four that attempted to succeed him. I don't think the final chapter has yet been written on the history of that period. But in any case, I wouldn't expect that Galston would have been in a position to see the uglier sides of the Cultural Revolution and don't blame him for reporting only what he saw.
| Author | Cather, Willa |
|---|---|
| Publication | Cambridge, Mass: Houghton Mifflin Co., Riverside Press, 1926 |
| Copyright Date | 1918 |
| Number of Pages | 372 |
| Extras | illustrations |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | February 1974 |
A beautifully written, sensitive book. Delves deeply into ordinary life in rural/small town Nebraska, not as an existentialist dilemma, but as a "rich mine of life" as she calls Antonia. Life is viewed as the sum of personal and interpersonal everyday experiences. But Cather does not see this as little or mean or depressing, but rather as very rich and full of deep human value.
The literary style is of uniformly high quality. There is a wealth of detail on the way different people behave and relate to each other. Some of the people are great human beings, others are relatively mean or stupid or crazy. But each is presented as a significant person, a subject, not just an object.
Suitable for many ages.
I don't know if I'd change a thing in this write-up today, though I'd add more about it.
As I recall, Antonia and her husband are immigrants from Czechoslovakia, living in the most rudimentary of homes - a sod house built into a hillside, in Nebraska. She has numerous children. Simple and uneducated, she nevertheless loves her family, works constantly for them, and is friendly and decent to all. When her husband dies, she goes on in her difficult but fulfilling life.
I don't think I've ever met anyone who read this book that wasn't moved by it.
| Author | Townsend, Robert |
|---|---|
| Publication | Greenwich, Conn: Fawcett Crest Books, Fawcett Publications, 1930 |
| Number of Pages | 220 |
| Extras | New chapters added |
| Genres | Non-fiction |
| Keywords | Business |
| When Read | February 1974 |
[No abstract]
Townsend is a sort of good hearted crackpot who has many insights into how corporations stifle their managers but he has no concern whatever over what they do to workers, consumers, foreign people, etc.
When I read this book my only experience in private industry was in the lowest of low positions - various jobs as a student hired for the summer. It was only later that I occupied a lower management position (at Online Computer Systems) or worked in any kind of close contact with management. I was clearly not the intended audience for Townsend's book and didn't have the knowledge or experience to appreciate it.
Looking at reviews on Amazon, I see that the book is still in print, still selling, still being recommended, and still being read. I'd also say that my comment was unfair. Townsend did care about workers and customers. His focus was on making a business financially successful, but he proposed to do it by making it work, not by counting beans and screwing workers or customers.
I expect that if I read it again today I'd have a very different opinion than what I had in 1974.
| Author | Meltzer, Milton |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967 |
| Number of Pages | 231 |
| Extras | Illustrated with contemporary prints and photographs |
| Extras | index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| When Read | March 1974 |
An excellent, short, popular history, told primarily in the words of contemporary workers, sympathizers, journalists, politicians, and a few capitalists.
Meltzer is a left liberal. He has an excellent anti-capitalist outlook, but no developed socialist consciousness. He actually seems to favor Gompers over Debs and approves of the so called "pragmatic" approach. Nevertheless, this is an excellent book for people new to the subject of labor history, despite its severe limitations.
It's hard for me now to reconstruct the various phases I went through in my attraction to Marxism, which I still find relevant to understanding history, and my beliefs in socialist policies and politics. I decided fairly early that there would not be a significant socialist party in the U.S., much less a socialist revolution, in any foreseeable future. So what did I want writers like Meltzer to do? If he was a progressive historian, as Meltzer was, should he be trying to bring his readers to believe all the same things that he believed, or should he merely be trying to move them a bit to the left, following the principle that the perfect is the enemy of the good?
I now consider that Meltzer knew far more than I did about what was and was not useful and practical in political education. My criticism of him from the left may have been accurate from a purely ideological perspective, but useless as commentary on how he should or should not have written his books.
In my defense I'll say that, when I made notes about books, I made them for myself. I wasn't imagining that either authors or other readers would ever see them - and they may not. My political criticisms of writers were not intended as public criticisms but as notes to myself about what I personally could or could not expect from an author and a book.
There are probably 200 or more books in my collected book notes to which the above notes apply, but I won't burden the notes with them. I'm hoping that, if I have any readers at all, they will see this or some similar notes, and not see me as too rigid and judgemental.
| Author | Barnett, Lincoln |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Bantam Books, 1957 |
| Copyright Date | 1948 |
| Number of Pages | 128 |
| Extras | Revised edition copyright 1957 |
| Extras | Forward by Albert Einstein |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Physics |
| Keywords | Cosmology |
| When Read | March 1974 |
Barnett gives a historical treatment of both quantum mechanics and relativity, illustrated with explanations of the major experiments, useful metaphors, and hypothetical cases. Unfortunately the philosophy of science which plays an important role in the book is uniformly poor. It is an inconsistent and irrelevant mixture of phenomenalism, spiritualism with occasional unperceived lapses of materialism. The book is also getting out of date since there have been important discoveries in astronomy since 1957.
Barnett explains both special and general theories, i.e., the theory of time frames, and the theories of the four dimensional continuum, the gravitational field theory, explanation of acceleration and gravity as identical, the "local distortion of the laws of geometry", etc.
Suitable for high school, but difficult to work through without help and made more obscure by the unworkable philosophy of science.
My 3x5 inch book cards were unsuitable for writing about such complex subjects. I'd love to know now just what statements Barnett made in philosophy of science that I found so objectionable but I can't remember what they were..
I never mastered the theories of relativity. Even today, as I write this, I am in the middle of yet another popular book on the subject, Ferreira's The Perfect Theory: A Century of Geniuses and the Battle Over Relativity. I'll never master it. I won't really even try since I couldn't possibly learn all the math with the time and brain cells remaining to me. But I go on reading popularizations that at least give me a peek at what the cognoscenti are thinking about.
| Author | Kosolapov, Richard |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Russian |
| Translators | Dixon, Richard |
| Publication | Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1970 |
| Number of Pages | 195 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Philosophy |
| Keywords | Marxism |
| When Read | March 1974 |
A methodical, straightforward, and actively partisan account of the epistemological, social and material bases of freedom. There are no flights of introspection and little use of metaphor. K analyzes the concrete activity which is free and the concrete conditions for its realization. He does not spend much time on the subjective feeling of freedom, concentrating instead on that which is objective and necessary for freedom.
Topics:
Four conditions of possibility of freedom - necessity, cognition or intellectual mastery of it, development of the productive forces for the technical and material mastery over it, social mastery over it.
Creativity in labor, alienation, division of labor.
Effects of expanding productivity over these.
Parts of the worker's day - free labor, necessary labor, domestic work, physiological functions, preparation for work, free time.
Integration of these into a whole.
See also my diary.
Going through the old hand written diary I find entries about Kosolapov on February 15 and March 13, of 1974. I elaborated many of K's ideas that were only mentioned in the book card entry above.
I noted in the February 15 entry that "Most of my reading has been for my young adult literature course. On Ms. Thomasson's advice I have begun putting notes on each book on an index card, a much better practice than my former one of recording authors and titles only in a little notebook. ... It does bother me to be reading only material suitable for young adults. I have decided to just make time for other things, regardless of the consequences. I have returned to Richard Kosolapov's Communism and Freedom ..."
Kosolapov's book now strikes me as a combination of serious work and paid propaganda. It starts from the premise that the Soviet Union is a successful socialist country that still has problems, but the problems are hangovers from capitalist days.
So I looked him up and found an interview in April 1991 in The Troubled Birth of Russian Democracy by Michael McFaul and Sergei Markov, page 206. A version of that book, published by the Hoover Institution, is available on books.google.com. K spoke about his desire to save communism out of the ashes of the the failing USSR. He had something of a tough childhood, his father was arrested and spent six years in prison but he, the son, became the "chief of the Central Committee's lecture group."
That is all way beyond me. I have only a limited understanding of the role of the Central Committee of the CPSU, and never had any idea that there was a Central Committee lecture group. I've never met anyone who could have been in such a position and can only speculate about Kosolapov's motives, milieu, and political and intellectual experience.
| Author | Griffin, John Howard |
|---|---|
| Publication | Boston, Cambridge: Houghton Mifflin Co., Riverside Press |
| Copyright Date | 1960 |
| Number of Pages | 178 |
| Genres | Non-fiction |
| Keywords | Racism |
| When Read | April 1974 |
A writer dyes his skin to experience racism. Griffin shows tremendous courage, sympathy, and humanity. He gives an inside look for white people of what it's like to be bullied, degraded, reviled - for no other reason than skin color.
Griffin is a devout Catholic, a man with a very idealist view of social change, but nonetheless a man of great stature. This is a must read book for white people.
Mainly concerned with the deep south in the period of legal segregation, but no doubt generalizable in some degree to modern times.
This was an important book that had a significant impact. It was reviewed in many places and read by many people. Griffin spent a long time, I seem to recall that it was a period of months, dying and treating his skin to get it to look like that of an African American or, using the term of that time, a Negro. He believed, and demonstrated, that a white man doesn't get a real appreciation of what bigotry and racism are like just by watching it from afar. He has to be the target of it. As a white man he knew what white people think and how they experience blacks. His book could speak to whites in a way that a book by a black man could not, just as watching racism in action as a white man didn't give the inside view that a black man had.
I was impressed by the conception and the execution of this project.
| Author | Townsend, John Rowe |
|---|---|
| Publication | Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1970 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| Keywords | Young adult |
| When Read | April 1974 |
Reasonable quality YA fiction. Seventeen year old, inexperienced accountant's son falls in with a slightly older but much more experienced waitress from a local lunchroom. He wants to marry her and break away from his humdrum life. She agrees but later tricks him into returning to his family for his own good.
While the story deals with a realistic interaction between a petty-bourgeois and proletarian, it does so solely from the safe viewpoint of the petty-bourgeois. The future of the waitress is only hinted at and is thrust out of sight. The petty-bourgeois world is the "normal" one. Townsend cannot face the fact that if the marriage took place, life would go on and his young hero would adjust. Proletarian life remains at the end - unthinkable.
My comments on this book could be made more acceptable to most readers by changing the terms "petty-bourgeois" and "proletarian" to "middle class" and "working poor", but I think the sense of the comments would still apply. It was a book about a working class girl who had no expectations of upward mobility and no participation in the "American dream", deciding that she couldn't allow this boy, who had the possibility of realizing such expectations, to give up his future on her account. Is that realistic? I think it probably was in 1970 and is now in 2017.
The sense of my comment in 1974 was that Townsend was uninterested in the future of the girl. He wanted to save the accountant's son from having to give up college, take a working class job, and live with a waitress for the rest of his life. In my reading of Townsend's book, the girl was doomed to that kind of life but the boy wasn't and Townsend saved him. That focus disturbed me then and still does now.
Townsend's approach to who wins and who loses is common in popular literature. It's often the waitress, or the servant, or the whore with the heart of gold, who makes the sacrifice to save the respectable hero of the book. The hero goes on to a bright future while the sacrificial lamb, as it were, fades into the past. The same thing happens in war movies where it's the black guy who gets shot, or the good Indian in the westerns. It makes me appreciate Tolstoy's Master and Man, that turned the convention around.
| Author | Allen, Elizabeth |
|---|---|
| Publication | Boston: E.P. Dutton and Co., 1973 |
| Number of Pages | 128 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| Keywords | Young adult |
| When Read | April 1974 |
High school popularity queen [Dietz] meets school dropout [Denny, the Loser] who shows her that life in a well heeled suburb is not the raison d'etre of human existence. Then with this new knowledge she settles in at the end with a new found aesthetic, intellectual, and liberal consciousness - in the suburb.
A mediocre book with the liberal's consciousness that all is not well but with total dishonesty in facing up to that truth. At the end, thd misfit drops out of sight, the queen develops her new found intellectual - social consciousness, the poetess bookworm younger sister blossoms forth into full butterfly.
As with many other books I read in the Spring of 1974, this would have been selected as a "young adult" book for my library school course in young adult librarianship.
I presume that the intended audience was high school age girls. For a whole bunch of reasons including my age, gender, political consciousness and activism, and my high school experience (not much like that of a popularity queen), I was not well equipped to read this book in the way it was intended. No doubt that caused me to miss some positive features of the book. Hopefully it enabled me to see some other features that may have been a bit less visible to the author.
What follows is the concluding paragraph of an Amazon review that I liked by Anna M. Ligtenberg ("AnnaLovesBooks"), posted in 2008.
The book is not really well written, and even seems a bit vague at times, but the story - particularly for the time period - is such an interesting look at suburban life just before it came under fire from the hippy culture [Anna considers that the book would have been written in the 1960's] that Denny and his friends seem to be early participants in. Deitz and her sister both learn a lot from their friendship with Denny, but you're sort of left wondering how the most turbulent decade in this country's recent history played out for the suddenly aware young girls. Not a book I expect most young adults (the target audience) to enjoy as much as adults might and some adults might only enjoy it for the nostalgia factor. Good, not great, and not quite the caliber I was expecting from a book that the internet tells me was a phenomenon in its time.
| Author | Zei, Alki |
|---|---|
| Original Language | gr |
| Translators | Fenton, Edward |
| Publication | New York: Holt Rinehart Winston, 1968 |
| Copyright Date | 1963 |
| Number of Pages | 177 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction; Politics |
| Keywords | Greece; Young adult |
| When Read | April 1974 |
The coming of fascism to Greece in 1936, told through the eyes of a young girl on a provincial island. Very strong class consciousness and hidden socialist consciousness, disguised (no doubt for the censor) under a discussion of dictatorship vs. democracy.
This book can give the young person or adult a greater understanding of the personal impact of fascism on people's lives. However it does not educate the casual reader as much as the conscious one. The lessons are too implicit instead of explicit in many cases - all cases concerning class questions. Nonetheless, it's a book worth knowing about, one that may play a small role in educating people and which completely avoids the bourgeois crap found in so many novels. Written from the proletarian viewpoint.
Looking her up I see that Zei, who may still be alive, was born in Athens in 1925, studied philosophy as well as theater and writing, lived in the USSR from 1954-64 to escape political repression in Greece, went back to Greece in 1964 but fled again, this time to Paris, after the coup in 1967. This and others of her books are still in print and some have recent publication dates - though I have no information about when they were written.
I guess that even to my leftist sensibilities, she passed muster as a fighter for socialism.
Another English language title for the same book was The Tiger in the Shop Window.
| Author | Whitehouse, Arch |
|---|---|
| Publication | Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Co. |
| Copyright Date | 1965 |
| Number of Pages | 270 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Aviation; World War I |
| When Read | April 1974 |
[No abstract]
Whitehouse has ground out a couple of dozen both true and fictionalized war stories. He writes with tremendous accuracy of the feelings and flight experiences of the WWI pilot - which he was himself. However he himself is obnoxious. He clearly has the mind of the soldier-adventurer-romanticist who cares only for the fight, not for the cause. He could equally well have fought for the other side.
To him the enlisted man is, at his best, a sort of loyal dog, not a full human being. He claims otherwise but he isn't convincing. All that matters is the battle, courage, composure, leadership, valor.
The style is professional, psychological, but not strongly coherent. One feels that the story is a chunk of Whitehouse's outpourings held together by the barest thread of a plot.
I found a very positive review of this book on Amazon that had a lot of information about his war record - a lot of it in conflict with his biography on the Wikipedia. He served in the British infantry in WWI, though I have no information as to whether he saw combat. He then transferred to the Royal Flying Corps (RFC) where he became a mechanic and an air observer - meaning that he flew in two seater airplanes, but not as the pilot. He did participate in air combat, presumably manning a flexible rear seat mounted machine gun, and is given partial credit shares in shooting down four enemy planes, all in 1917.
Whitehouse would have been 18 years old when the war began in Europe. He left New Jersey to join the British Army (he was born in England.) If I was right in my assessment of him, he did it for the adventure as much or more than anything else. By 1917, he would have been 21 years old, still fairly young. I don't know if he ever fought in the trenches, where hardly anyone emerged with romantic adventure ideas about the war.
Contrast this book with Winged Victory by V.M. Yeates that I read later this same year. Was one of the books authentic and the other a farce, written for money? If so I'd have to vote in favor of the Yeates as the authentic book. However Whitehouse was there too, so I'm thinking that each of these authors had authentic experience in the war but they represented radically different temperaments. People are different.
| Author | Ansley, Delight |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Co., 1955 |
| Number of Pages | 266 |
| Extras | index, bibliography |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History; Biography |
| Keywords | American Civil War; Young adult |
| When Read | April 1974 |
A relatively simple and popular treatment of John Brown, the American abolitionist. It opened my eyes to an aspect of America's revolutionary heritage which I knew little about.
Brown was an adventurist without any scientific understanding of politics, fighting, or history. He was also deeply religious. However he was a consistent and courageous fighter who fought for liberation of the slaves and not for any personal gain or for neurotic or self-gratifying revenge. He passed up an opportunity to kill the murderer of his own son during the guerrilla warfare in Kansas because it would not further the cause.
Despite his adventurism and penchant for action he won the support of Frederick Douglass, Thoreau, Emerson, and many abolitionists and the rank and file of the movement. Support for Brown's courage and activism was a sort of touchstone for the seriousness of liberal intellectuals.
Ansley does a good job on both the political and personal side though he stops short of class analysis. Maybe it was the temper of the times (1955).
I think that the "temper of the times" was indeed a major factor in the writing of this book. The U.S. was coming out of the McCarthy period of right wing persecution of "Reds", who included a lot of the people concerned about the civil rights of black people in the U.S. The civil rights movement was just getting started.
Just 15 years before this book was published, the Hollywood movie Santa Fe Trail was released. Starring Errol Flynn and Ronald Reagan as American army soldiers and Raymond Massey as John Brown, it depicted Brown as a criminal and crazy person. Flynn played J.E.B. Stewart, a soon to be Confederate general, and Reagan played George Armstrong Custer, a soon to be Union general. I liked the movie as a boy but later saw it for what I still think it was, an attempt to unite North and South in condemnation of a violent attempt to free the black slaves. The movie was a big money maker. There were a lot of changes needed in the U.S. and I think this book was part of the movement to make them.
| Author | London, Jack |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Washington Square Press (paperback), 1968 |
| Copyright Date | 1903 |
| Number of Pages | 102 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | April 1974 |
Giant dog becomes wild in Alaska. Some of the writing had great power. The reader is introduced to the world of "club and fang" in a brutal, shocking way. Relationships between dogs are particularly strikingly portrayed - especially the development of the struggle between Buck and Spitz for leadership of the pack.
London makes vitality in the fullest sense of the word, cunning, power, speed, reflexiveness, etc., the supreme animal value, that which makes the dog's life worthwhile - when it is worthwhile, an ubermensch in dogdom. It is not unconvincing. One feels the impact of such a view on human psychology. An anti-civilized component of people, perhaps very prevalent in the world London moved in.
Two years after publishing this book, London published White Fang. It was the reverse of this book. In Call of the Wild, a civilized, domesticated dog is taken to Alaska and turned into a wild animal. In White Fang a wild animal is taken back to the U.S. after being turned into a domesticated partner of a man. Being a domestic sort of fellow, that book appealed to me more than this one, though this one was good and did lead me to read others of London's books.
| Author | Pollard, Madeleine |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Holt Rinehart Winston, 1968 |
| Number of Pages | 209 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Roman Empire; Young adult |
| When Read | April 1974 |
A young girl belonging to an extremely primitive British tribe is sent to Rome as a slave. Tremendously impressed by Roman civilization (buildings, roads, clothes, religion, discipline, leisure class, knowledge, etc.) she attempts to tell her people to accept Roman conquest. The task is impossible and everything she attempts fails.
The literary quality of the book is not high but the understanding of primitive vs. advanced slave civilization is very good and well characterized. The child is shocked to find people with form fitting clothes, clean hands, heliographs, the ability to stand in a row, not to mention grosser differences in buildings, roads, etc.
I recall a scene from this book where the girl sees a Roman officer with a column of legionaries. She is astounded to see that the men wear identical clothes, armor, weapons, even sandals. She had never seen anything like that in her life. The scene stayed with me because I had never thought about that before. The differences between the Greeks and Romans first of all, and the peoples around them were enormous. No one in Britain would have ever seen a city, a paved road, manufactured goods (made in those days by workshops, not machines, but still with uniform designs), uniform clothing and, wonder of wonders, a scroll or a book.
I now know from other reading that when Julius Caesar invaded Gaul and encountered Franks and Allemani, those Germanic tribesmen disdained the Romans. The Germans were physically bigger than the Romans and used bigger swords and battle axes. They (the Germans) had practiced sword fighting since childhood. They had a rude awakening however when they fought the legions and found themselves methodically beaten and humiliated, even when they outnumbered their foes.
I have often accepted leadership from people who I thought were more capable than me. I've wondered whether, if I were a barbarian in Britain, Gaul, Iberia, Illyria, or North Africa if I would aspire to become a Roman rather than to continue my barbarian life. If I had the temperament that I have now, I wouldn't be interested in being a legionary, but I might be very interested in working as a scribe, a builder, a craftsman, or if I dared aspire so high, an engineer, or even a philosopher.
One of the great innovations of the Roman Empire was the concept of a Roman citizen - a person who did not have to live in Rome, or Italy, or even speak Latin. To win citizenship was no simple feat, but there had not been anything so cosmopolitan before.
I think Pollard understood and communicated some important Roman achievements in the ancient world.
| Author | Asimov, Isaac |
|---|---|
| Publication | Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1952 |
| Copyright Date | 1952 |
| Number of Pages | 217 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | April 1974 |
S-F story of a planet held in subjection by another. A "Spatio-analyst" discovers that the sun of the exploited planet will nova soon. He is suppressed to avoid a panic that would disrupt production.
Asimov is good not only at science but also at society. Not a Marxist, he is at least conscious of social issues and makes them central themes in his books. He often takes the perspective of the ordinary, the downtrodden.
I was still reading books through my Marxist spectacles.
I did not write down the publishing information for this book. The data in this XML record is taken from a 1952 edition offered for sale on Amazon.
| Author | Solzhenitsyn, Aleksander |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Russian |
| Translators | Hingley, Ronald; Hayward, Max |
| Publication | New York: Bantam Books, 1963 |
| Copyright Date | 1972 |
| Number of Pages | 203 |
| Extras | Letter to the Congress of Soviet Writers by Alexander Solzhenitsyn |
| Genres | Fiction |
| Keywords | Soviet Union |
| When Read | May 1974 |
Solzhenitsyn is a very good writer, not outstanding, but quite good. My first impression is that this is not the product of anti-socialist consciousness, but rather a legitimate outcry against distortions and anti-social governmental acts. Ivan Denisovich Shukhov is sent to prison on a false charge. He fills his days there with the struggle for an extra piece of bread, a cigarette, a few minutes sleep, and so on.
The conditions, despite S's horror of them, do not appear worse than many American prisons, but that isn't saying much.
Shukhov likes work, is fair to the peple who are fair to him, is callous to those who are hurtful to him, and also to strangers. He is apolitical, alone, but not an elitist individualist. He is religious but not mystical.
S speaks more from a backward undeveloped consciousness than from a counterrevolutionary one. Nevertheless, his charges are serious and deserve consideration. It is not clear, from this book at least, that he is a crackpot. I will read more.
I read this book again 22 years later (and 21 years ago). I think my write-up then was more informative and more perceptive.
| Author | Kafka, Franz |
|---|---|
| Original Language | German |
| Translators | Muir, Willa and Edwin; Butler, E.M. |
| Publication | Modern Library, 1964 |
| Copyright Date | 1925 |
| Number of Pages | 264 |
| Extras | appendices |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | May 1974 |
Joseph K. is accused of an unspecified crime, investigated, tried in a most impenetrable fashion, and executed by stabbing.
All the conversations have an aura of great importance and yet total insubstantiality. Each piece of advice comes from people "connected" with the court, but it all concerns the use of personal influence, each in a different way, rather than actual legal processes - which are reserved solely for court officials. All the people are low or middle level bureaucrats or seductive women. Each uses his official role simply as a cover for petty ambition.
There is no escape. The obsequious can win only "ostensible acquittal" or "indefinite postponement", there is no definite acquittal. The bold, such as K, are found guilty. Because the actual progress of the case is unobservable one is tempted to try to forget it. But it is nonetheless deadly.
This great classic novel perfectly captures everybody's nightmare of being caught in a bureaucratic machine with which there is no reasoning and from which there is no escape. It was written in 1914-15 but not published until after Kafka's death in 1924.
I'm not sure when I first developed the desire to read this novel. It's possible that I read I.B. Singer's story, "A Friend of Kafka" before reading this. I surely came across Kafka's name in high school and college literature classes and saw references to him in other books. I know that, by the time I read it, it was something that I had already told myself I had to read. It would be an essential part of my literary education.
I did read it. I was right. It was essential.
| Author | Grass, Gunter |
|---|---|
| Original Language | German |
| Translators | Unrecorded |
| Publication | Fawcett Crest, 1962 |
| Copyright Date | 1959 |
| Number of Pages | 572 |
| Extras | glossary |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| When Read | July 1974 |
Oskar Matzerath/Bronski, born 1924 in Danzig, stops growing at age 3 when he begins his career as a permanently three year old drummer. Each person that he loves he betrays and dooms. The book is dominated by these betrayals and by Oskar's fascination with and fear of women who will betray him in the same innocent and yet diabolical way, viz. Lucy Rennwand, the Black Witch. Fascism and war are noted but not resisted or even much thought about.
Grass' literary style is excellent. The approach is psychological, each character being deep and yet highly exaggerated. Each is caught in webs of frustration and betrayal. Each longs for the unattainable in some way.
The outlook is cynical, individualistic, nihilistic, "barbaric, mystical, bored." All political tendencies are treated as absurd. All characters are from the petit-bourgeoisie or artistic community. All men are alienated. All women are earthy, dim, motherly, understanding, intuitive.
My 3x5 inch book card abstract captured only a small fraction of this very complicated multi-part, multi-year story. Oskar is somehow a dwarf by choice. Later he chooses to grow again and does so, though still not to normal size. He is involved with both a German father and a Polish father, each of whom dies during the war, each in part due to the actions of Oskar ("Each person that he loves he betrays and dooms.") There are complicated relationships with women. My comment tries to say something about how strange it all was, but I think that no one who hasn't read the book would get much from reading my book card.
I have read very little German literature, mainly Mann, Grass, Boll, and later Zweig, with a smattering of other books. This may have been the first novel I read by a German. I think of English, Russian, French, and Spanish speaking writers as being ahead of the Germans and I read Grass and Boll in part to remedy this gap in my reading and my knowledge of European culture.
I don't know for certain but I think this was probably the first book I finished after our move from Champaign-Urbana to Baltimore. I have a paperback copy of the book in our basement and, assuming I read that copy (not a necessary assumption since I sometimes bought books I had already read if I found them cheap at a used book sale) I probably started the book in Illinois and finished it in Maryland.
The reason I'm noting that is that the move from the University of Illinois to the Enoch Pratt Free Library was a significant change in my intellectual and reading life as much as it was a change in our lifestyle. In both places I had access to great libraries. The U of I had a tremendous library with five million titles. It is the fifth largest collection in the U.S. now and I believe that it was then. For a public library, Pratt was also pretty great, better than most American cities, but it only had about 500,000 titles, one-tenth as many. Still, for a public library, it was pretty good. Since I became a computer programmer in 1979, I've mostly relied on the county libraries - a comedown from my years in Illinois and at Pratt.
| Author | Muller, Herbert J. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Indiana University Press, 1974 |
| Number of Pages | 264 |
| Extras | index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Society; Politics |
| When Read | July 1974 |
The professor of English and Government gives the liberal/humaitarian/social democrat view of U.S. society and prospects. He rails against Nixon, Billy Graham, atrocity in Vietnam, pollution, etc. The book is most notable for its recognition of the facts of economic imperialism, existence of classes, permanence of class struggle, and past failures of liberalism.
Muller's view on authoritarianism, Stalin, etc., are the grounds for his anti-communism. Still, despite an obvious political upbringing in the liberal democrat tradition, Muller sees and understands the contradictions of liberalism. The book is evidence for the heightening of those contradictions. Perhaps the honest liberals are, more than before, facing facts.
I was a pretty convinced Marxist during the early 1970's. The war was still raging in Vietnam and I was committed to fighting against that. However, I hope that, in spite of my strong views, I still appreciated and felt significant solidarity with people like Muller who agreed with many of my positions, minus the Marxist ideology. My comments on Muller were condescending, but at least they were sympathetic.
| Author | Stalin, Joseph |
|---|---|
| Author | Central Committee of the CPSU(B) |
| Publication | Calcutta: National Book Agency (PVT) Ltd., 1968 |
| Copyright Date | 1938 |
| Number of Pages | 338 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | Soviet Union; Marxism |
| When Read | July 1974 |
The "Stalin" viewpoint on the history of the CPSU. Very strikingly "left" in its attacks on Menshevism, Trotskyism, economism, and so on.
The history is informative. The analysis is absolutely concise and straight to the point. Written during the purges, it takes an ultraleft line on "enemies of the people".
The date says that I finished this book in August, 1974. My diary entry for July 17, 1974 places me in the Humanities Department of the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore. However I think I probably started the book in May or June while still in Champaign-Urbana.
The reason I'm thinking that I started the book while we were still in Illinois is that I recall my friend and mentor, Joe Phillips, a Marxist professor of economics at the University, saying that the great thing about "official" histories is that they are official. They may or may not tell the truth about history, but they truthfully report what they want people to believe about history. On that we can rely. This recollection makes me think we read, or perhaps only started, this book as part of the book group that Professor Phillips held at his house with grad students like me from various departments and a number of countries around the world. However it is possible that the book was mentioned in the book group but not read by them. I may have obtained a copy and read it after leaving Illinois.
The CPSU and its followers around the world would have been in considerable turmoil at the time this was written. "Old Bolsheviks" were disappearing into the maw of the purges, the camps, and the execution rooms of the NKVD at a frightening rate. Communists around the world, already divided by the Trotskyist (or "Trotskyite" if you were a Stalinist) faction were having to swallow the line that people with high reputations were traitors and sellouts, or else align themselves with people who were shunned and threatened by those who adhered to the Soviet line. This history was certainly an attempt to bring all believers into the fold with one view of what had happened to the movement. I don't know how much of an effect it had. Most communists stuck with the USSR's leadership, in significant part because of Russia being the only supporter of the Spanish Republic, and in part because of Russia's advocacy of "Popular Front" movements in France and elsewhere where the left was under siege. That, of course, fell apart when the German-Soviet Non-aggression Pact was announced.
| Author | Dunham, Barrows |
|---|---|
| Publication | Boston: Little Brown and Co., 1953 |
| Number of Pages | 262 |
| Extras | index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Philosophy |
| When Read | August 1974 |
An attempt at a popular Marxist critique of contemporary bourgeois philosophy, i.e., idealism (especially Royce), pragmatism (James), and postivism (Moore and Reichenbach are mentioned.)
Topics: permanence and change, skepticism, relativism, opportunism and intellectuals.
Dunham concludes that "the moral ideal is that organization of mankind in which satisfaction of human needs occurs with complete efficiency."
As a philosophical work the treatment is far too cavalier and superficial. James, Moore, etc. are seen in grossly exaggerated form. The refutations are of straw men. As a popular work there is not nearly enough attention to explaining the basic concepts of Marxism and too much to refuting people with limited popular audience.
Nonetheless Dunham has the right perspective. His scorn for bourgeois philosophers is clearly a personally felt one. He has seen, especially in the sordid McCarthy era, the progression of scores of intellectuals from progressives, to skeptics, to waverers, to opportunists, to renegades. His descriptions of the process are particularly good.
Many decades have passed since I read the works of the philosophers mentioned above. However when I did read them, I was attracted by what they had to say, particularly William James (not Henry) and George Edward "G.E." Moore. I don't remember as much about Royce and Reichenbach.
My own personal concerns about the academic philosophy that I was taught involved its abstraction from society and from history. When we read Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Hume, Kant, and other writers, we read them as if they were all speaking to each other, not to people of their own times, and all were concerned about the same issues. There is a sense in which that point of view offers insight. When Plato and Descartes and Kant wrote about the grounds of knowledge and the limits of our ability to attain knowledge, they were writing about the same issues. But there are other senses in which they were addressing very different problems. Plato's work had something to do with building a better society in the midst of political upheaval. Descartes' had something to do with breaking free of the prison of revealed religion. Kant's had something to do with exploring the limits imposed by our human consciousness on what we could learn about the world. Sometimes these social and historical contexts were more important and sometimes less, but I think it was a mistake to completely eliminate them from the teaching of philosophy.
Now, with the aid of the Internet, I have learned more about Barrows Dunham. He was a professor of philosophy at Temple University until he was fired for his refusal to "name names" of communists to the House Un-American Activities Committee. He was blacklisted from all teaching jobs, finally getting work as a visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania School of Social Work in 1971. If his work appeared strident and angry, he had a reason for that.
The notes in my book card were organized differently from above, with information about the book and reaction to it interspersed. For the XML conversion, I moved all of the information about the book to the "abstract" field and all of my reactions to the "comment" field.
| Author | Wolitzer, Hilma |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: William Morrow and Co., 1974 |
| Number of Pages | 223 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | August 1974 |
A love story from a woman's perspective on the death by cancer of her young husband. She analyzes her love for him, her love for her two small children, and lives out his deterioration and death.
Reasonably well written with good power to express the elements of a successful love. W certainly knows something about love. However the story is depressing enough that (besides other reasons) I wouldn't have read it unless I had to for the library. One wonders whether the author is telling a true story she knows, is obsessed by fears of separation, and is feeding upon them, or has a cool eye for the jaded sensibilities of the literary marketplace.
This was an intense book that made a strong impression on me. It made me think about what it would be like for me if Marcia were dying, or for Marcia if I were dying. Obviously, whether Wolitzer did or didn't know someone who went through this, she applied her formidable powers of imagination to understand the process quite deeply.
Checking Amazon, I see that the book is still available in a Kindle edition and there are nine reviews. Most say that the book is very realistic, along with the usual one or two that thought it was boring.
Checking her website, I see that this was Wolitzer's first novel, published when she was 44. She would have been born in 1930 and would be around 87 at the time of this writing. I see nine novels and some other work listed by her on the website. Meg Wolitzer, another novelist, is her daughter.
I tend to pick certain kinds of books to read. There have been changes in my reading habits as I got older, however I was never a fan of love stories and other books that are more popular with women than men. It is good that I am pushed into reading such books from time to time by the library in the years when I was a librarian, and by the book groups I've joined in other years. That has probably been a good thing. Certainly it's true that it resulted in my reading some very good writers whom I would otherwise have missed.
| Author | Childe, V. Gordon |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1968 |
| Copyright Date | 1928 |
| Number of Pages | 253 |
| Extras | index, plates |
| Extras | Revised numerous times up to 1952 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Anthropology |
| When Read | September 1974 |
A very careful survey of the archaeological record of ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, and the Indus Valley just prior to the emergence of empires. It is mostly taken up with descriptions of pottery, implements, bricks, and cross comparisons between sites and cultures. Some very interesting evidence is examined on the emergence of classes, slaves, private property, cities, specialists, etc. Topics include: the use of seals to identify property, the growth of rich vs. poor burials, the first writing, the emergence of one clan over all others and the elevation of its totem to the status of national symbol, the first depictions of bound men-slaves, etc.
Childe's work is not exciting or grandiose but its thoroughgoing scholarship and scientific spirit makes it a pleasure to read. Childe presents the evidence in a strong and clear light. Contending theories are presented and intelligently evaluated.
Books like these are fascinating to me. When, why, and how did language emerge? When, why and how was farming invented? How did these innovations take hold and spread? We have written history to tell us something about the last 2,500 years. It's imperfect and much too much has been lost, but we can at least read some the words of the actual people of those times. Before that however all we have are the physical remains of the artifacts of our ancestors. From those bits and pieces of those buildings, tools, pots and images our archaeologists try to create a coherent picture of our past.
Childe was a British Marxist. He had an interest in many of the same questions that interested me. He wanted to know about pots and tools, as all the archaeologists did, but he had a special interest in the social, economic, and political characteristics of the life of those times and in how new forms of society emerged.
I read his possibly more famous book, Man Makes Himself in 1983.
| Author | Gorky, Maxim |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Russian |
| Translators | Unrecorded |
| Publication | New York: Frederick Unger, 1959 |
| Number of Pages | 348 |
| Extras | Introduction by Stefan Zweig |
| Genres | Fiction; Short stories |
| When Read | September 1974 |
[No abstract]
Magnificent stories. My first exposure to Gorky. He speaks of and for the silent and unheard from proletariat and brings to life the rich quality of that class. His people are generally ignorant and backward. They have no hope whatever as individuals. They are absorbed in petty problems, but they bear in themselves the seeds of a new society.
Gorky has an eye for the unsung hero, the spark of resistance, the earthy and yet soaring values.
I did not record the names or dates of the stories. I can't find any information about the edition beyond what I recorded in 1974. I suspect that they were all written before the 1917 revolution and very possibly all before the 1905 revolution. Gorky himself had a terrible childhood, was on his own even before becoming a teenager, didn't learn to read until age 12 when he was taught by a cook while working on a river steamer, and had a very intimate and personal knowledge of proletarian life.
I was accustomed in my solidly Marxist years to talking about "petty-bourgeois intellectuals", as can be seen from my book card notes from the 1970's. Gorky was a proletarian intellectual. His novels and stories were something new and different in the world of fiction. I don't know if he's still read today, but he should be.
| Author | Lorenz, Konrad |
|---|---|
| Original Language | German |
| Translators | Unrecorded |
| Publication | New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974 |
| Copyright Date | 1973 |
| Number of Pages | 103 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Society |
| When Read | September 1974 |
Overpopulation, "genetic decay", "entropy of feeling", technology out of bounds, etc. A typically naive, off the top of the head, petty bourgeois intellectual's view of the downfall of civilization. Naturally, imperialism, poverty, exploitation, racism, war, etc. are not even mentioned as "deadly sins." Obviously, these are not dangerous to the good professor.
The book is also instructive as a bad example even of natural science - biology - Lorenz' Nobel Prize winning specialty. He tries to reduce sociology, history, and politics to biology, thereby twisting and distorting even biology in the process.
I recommended that we keep the one copy we have in the library, but that's all.
The last sentence of my comment indicates that I read this book for the Pratt Library. When new books arrived at the library many of them were assigned out to librarians to read and make recommendations on whether the library should buy more copies. I apparently recommended that this book be kept, but no more copies ordered. Searching the catalog now I found 11 titles by or about Lorenz, but this one was not among them. Perhaps the acquisitions librarian took my advice, and ordered no more copies. If the copy I read got lost, that would be it.
The tone of my book notes written in 1974 now appears to me to be strident and unwarrantably arrogant. The glib business about a "petty bourgeois intellectual" says more about me than about Lorenz. Who was I, a 28 year old librarian to say such things about a Nobel Prize winning scientist, a man who really did discover important truths about the world and whose educational and intellectual attainments were far above mine.
Well, I apologize for that. My youth and my leftist, anti-establishment politics combined to make me more abrasive than I had the right to be. However I don't think the argument I made was besides the point. War, revolution, colonialism and neo-colonialism, and reaction were devastating Southeast Asia, and much of Africa and South and Central America. Yet they and the social and economic forces that drove them were missing from Lorenz' book about what our society was doing wrong. It seemed to me that he should have said something about them.
The things he did mention, like "genetic decay", are very suspicious. Lorenz was known to have been a member of the Nazi Party. Intelligent and hard working as the man was, I think his ideas about society were both mistaken and, at least in some cases, pretty reprehensible.
Upon reflection I'm inclined to reconsider my judgment, not of the book, but of my recommendation to the library. Maybe a library like Pratt, a central library not only for the city of Baltimore but for the entire state of Maryland, should have a copy of each of the books that each Nobel Prize winner wrote. My initial judgment to keep one copy and buy no others is still appealing to me but I might now recommend that the Library replace the copy that was lost. Maybe.
| Author | Lem, Stanislaw |
|---|---|
| Original Language | French |
| Translators | Kilmartin; Cox, Steve |
| Publication | New York: Walker and Co., 1970 |
| Copyright Date | 1961 |
| Number of Pages | 216 |
| Extras | Forward by Darko Suvin. |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | September 1974 |
S-F by a man truly knowledgeable about science, history, philosophy.
A scientist on a station above Solaris, living ocean planet, comes to terms with the differences between different forms of life and gets new insight into himself. Some beautiful passages describing a fictionalized history of science.
[No comment]
I wasn't writing very much back in the early days of my book cards.
This was the first book I read by Lem. It was his breakout book, the one that brought him to the attention of not just the science fiction world, but also of the literary world in general. It was made into a quite artistic movie in the Soviet Union, also spreading its fame.
A small group of human scientists are working on a space station in orbit above the planet Solaris. They start to see things. A man meets his long dead wife in the halls of the station. He knows that she cannot be real and he hides her from his comrades. Soon he realizes that they are also hiding things from him and from each other. Each is somehow being affected by the planet they are studying. Somehow, it is studying them. Although they have found no life forms on the planet they are coming to believe that the planet itself is conscious in some way.
Each man grapples with the demons of his subconscious and his memory that the planet has unleashed. Each tries to fulfill his function as a scientist. There are no special physical threats but each man faces the threat of madness.
It was a quite remarkable book. It led me to read most or all (I'm not sure what I might have missed) of Lem's works available in English.
Interestingly, I see that this book was translated from French. His earlier book The Invincible was translated from German. However, to the best of my knowledge, all of his books were written in Polish. Were Polish translators so hard to find in the late 1960's?
| Author | Kaye, Harvey, M.D. |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1974 |
| Number of Pages | 213 |
| Extras | index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Psychology; Society |
| When Read | October 1974 |
Big gun psychiatrist attacks the American Hollywoodish image of masculinity. Lots of penis fetishism and "deep" psychoanalytic explanations of people's problems.
What value it has is obscured by its anti-female stance.
I didn't think enough of this book to write anything about it. I probably read it as a review book for the library since it's not about a topic I normally follow. It's too bad I don't have the review that I would have posted for the library - though conceivably it still lives in some index card file down at 400 Cathedral Street in Baltimore.
| Author | Yeates, V.M. |
|---|---|
| Publication | London: Jonathan Cape, 1962 |
| Copyright Date | 1934 |
| Number of Pages | 456 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Aviation; World War I |
| When Read | November 1974 |
A World War I pilot's fear and depression mount to a final collapse in alcoholism and debility. All his friends have died and he sees no reason or purpose in the war.
Yeates, who died just after finishing his first novel, is aware of the imperialist nature of the war and believes he is being asked to die for no other purpose than plunder and usury. However his analysis is basically incomplete and contradictory. As a result he cannot solve his personal dilemma and decide on a positive course of action. He considers desertion, surrender, malingering, but cannot decide if it is scruple or fear that motivates him. He winds up doing his "duty" at each crisis, killing the "Huns" and drowning his fear and depression in drink. After six months at the front he finishes his term of service and is sent home in a state of emotional collapse.
Although the whole story of Tom Cundall takes place at the front, his past is never mentioned, this is nonetheless an extremely authentic book. Flying scenes are numerous and excellent.
This was an important book. I once read a statement by an RAF pilot who fought in the Battle of Britain in WWII, that all of the British pilots read this book. To my mind it had something of the same power as Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front.
I remember one crisis scene in the book where Cundall and his squadron are following a new gung-ho squadron leader, heading towards a German squadron in the distance. Cundall has the sinking realization that, first, the leader is not backing down, he's leading them towards the enemy and second, that the Germans aren't backing down either. There is an "oh shit" moment when Cundall realizes that there is going to be a fight. There was a powerful sense of suddenly facing the real thing. Those guys out there are going to try to kill me, and it looks like they're damned good at it too. It's one thing to read about facing death. It's something entirely different to face it in the flesh. Then something happens. The new pilot in the squadron, flying as the wingman of the squadron leader, accidentally brushes his plane against the squadron leader's plane. Both are damaged and both begin to fall, out of control. There are no parachutes. Cundall and the other British pilots watch the two men slowly spin down to their deaths. Then they turn around and head back to their field, saved from the deadly fight that their erstwhile leader had selected for them.
This was one of those books that goes beyond the imagined romance and adventure of war in the air. I'm not surprised that all of the RAF pilots read it.
| Author | Brecht, Bertolt |
|---|---|
| Original Language | German |
| Translators | Laughton, Charles |
| Publication | New York: Grove Press, 1961 |
| Copyright Date | 1939 |
| Number of Pages | 72 pages |
| Extras | Published in Seven Plays by Bertolt Brecht. |
| Genres | Theater play; Historical fiction |
| When Read | November 1974 |
A play about the nature of science and the social role of the scientist. Galileo, the brilliant scientist, is dedicated to the service of truth and to his own material comforts. In the new bourgeois society of Venice his truth is significant only insofar as he invents money making gadgets. G goes to reactionary Florence and Rome in order to receive a gratis stipend. But here even the truth about the stars is revolutionary and dangerous. When shown the instruments of torture, he cops out.
At the end his old pupil Andrea Sarti smuggles Galileo's secret manuscript across the border. Sarti sees some boys about to harm an old woman. He shows them the evidence that she is merely an old woman and not a witch. Then, when they attack her anyway, he considers that he has discharged his obligation by presenting the evidence. He goes on his way.
[No comment]
Brecht was no stranger to moral dilemmas and, ultimately, no stranger to the difficult decisions about whether to escape from a dilemma or to try to resolve it. In my notes for the next book I read in this listing I talked about the impossibility of resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and my own likely choice of trying to escape if I were personally caught up in it.
I saw in the news last night that the Turkish government led by Recep Tayip Erdogan has banned the teaching of evolution in Turkish schools. Religious irrationality continues. Galileo and Brecht would certainly have understood.
It has been too long since I read anything by Brecht and I'm no longer able to express any informed thoughts about his powers as a playwright except to say that they were formidable.
| Author | Kodsy, Ahmad El |
|---|---|
| Author | Lobel, Eli |
| Publication | New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970 |
| Number of Pages | 137 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History; Politics |
| Keywords | Israel |
| When Read | November 1974 |
[This book contains two separate articles, Nationalism and Class Struggle in the Arab World by Ahmad El Kodsy, and Palestine and the Jews by Eli Lobel.]
Lobel spotlights the contradiction inherent in Zionism's commitment to a Jewish majority. This must inevitably lead to favored Jewish immigration, expulsions of Arabs, and denial of Arab civil rights. This is especially so in light of the Jews' stagnant birth rate and the Arabs' very high rate.
Mediocre articles but with some valuable insights.
I see that I wrote nothing at all about Ahmad El Kodsy's article and focused on only a single issue in Lobel's article.
It was an important issue. If there is not a Jewish majority in Israel it must either 1) cease to be a Jewish state or 2) cease to be a democratic state, becoming instead a state of Jewish citizens and Arab second class citizens or non-citizens. Option 1) is totally unacceptable to the majority of Jews in Israel. Some will see it as the end of Zionism, and the end of a homeland for Jews, becoming instead just another state with a Jewish minority, liable to oppression by the majority. The history of antagonism between the Jewish and Arab communities exacerbates that problem. Option 2) is totally unacceptable to the majority of Arabs living in Israel (or in Israeli occupied territory.) Most will see it as a denial of their human and national rights.
The only solution that has garnered significant support, and I think was then (1970) and is now (2017) only minority support in each community, is the "two state" solution. To achieve that, the Israeli government and a majority of Jews in Israel would have to be willing and able to suppress, almost certainly by force, the settler movement. There has been no political will to do that. Similarly, the Palestinian Authority would have to be willing and able to suppress, almost certainly by force, the Arab organizations such as Hamas and Hezbollah that accept no compromise and demand a Palestinian state in all of the territory controlled by Israel.
I have to admit that if I were either a Jew or a Palestinian living in Israel, I would be most tempted to emigrate to another country rather than commit to what looks like a losing battle for a sane solution to the problem. However the emigration option is not open to everyone and the risks and unknowns are significant now that terrorism and ethnic resentment have been growing around the world.
| Author | Golding, William |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Harcourt Brace and World, 1955 |
| Number of Pages | 233 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Stone age |
| When Read | December 1974 |
A primitive Neanderthal group, still below the stage of savagery, rubs up against, and is destroyed by, a group of Cro-Magnons.
There are very fine depictions of the differences between sub-primitive and primitive society - big gaps, not only in stone tools, but in language, social organization, religion, and so on.
The overall authenticity is probably not high. However good insights are displayed into humanity.
As in Lord of the Flies, the overall view is tragic with ignorance and petty selfishness stifling the higher values. Still, one recognizes high potential in the Neanderthals. It is to Golding's discredit that he does not display this potential in Cro-Magnon.
The story opens with a small group, maybe an extended family, of Neanderthals. A grown man, Lok, not the brightest of the group, is the observer and protagonist of the story. We follow him and them for quite some time before the invading, (or maybe "traveling" is a better word) Cro-Magnons appear in the forest. The Cro-Magnons are armed with spears, use fire, have canoes of some kind, and are overly defensive and aggressive, killing Neanderthals and stealing their babies for no reason that Lok can discern. When they throw a spear at him he wonders if it's intended as a gift.
It's a tragic story. The brightest fellow in the Neanderthal group, a man who frequently speaks of "pictures" (ideas) in his head, is killed quite suddenly and the rest of the group is easily victimized. Lok, a man with few pictures, is left, bereft of friends and family, as the Cro-Magnon move on.
Even now, 62 years after the book was published, we have very limited evidence about how the Neanderthals lived and what their interactions with the new people out of Africa were like. Nevertheless, Golding's depiction of them wins our assent, or at any rate, it won mine. It was an impressive conception. I liked it as much as any of Golding's books - which is saying quite a lot.