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- <text id=93TT1467>
- <title>
- Apr. 19, 1993: From The Publisher
- </title>
- <history>
- TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1993
- Apr. 19, 1993 Los Angeles
- </history>
- <article>
- <source>Time Magazine</source>
- <hdr>
- FROM THE PUBLISHER, Page 4
- </hdr>
- <body>
- <p> Let's admit it: Journalists can't stop writing. They are
- obsessed with the idea that they have something significant to
- tell the world. Often what they have to say may be less than
- earthshaking. At other times, they can knock your hat off. My
- hat is off to four TIME staff members whose obsessions have
- produced new books that you will be hearing about in the next
- few weeks.
- </p>
- <p> From Robert Hughes, TIME's tireless art critic, comes
- Culture of Complaint (Oxford University Press), a lacerating
- study of the decline in American values that will surely raise
- amens among many people, as well as hackles among others. The
- book is an expanded version of a three-part lecture series that
- Hughes gave early last year at the New York Public Library and
- subsequently summarized in a TIME cover story, "The Fraying of
- America" [Feb. 3, 1992]. Among his complaints: the distortion
- of the ideals of multiculturalism, the erosion of the English
- language by partisans of the Politically Correct, the decline
- of education, the damage to politics and the culture in general
- wrought by extremists on both the left and the right. And that's
- only Lecture 1.
- </p>
- <p> The B.C.C.I. affair, about which you have read much in
- these pages, is now given full exposure in a riveting book, The
- Outlaw Bank: A Wild Ride into the Secret Heart of B.C.C.I.
- (Random House), by investigative reporter Jonathan Beaty and
- senior editor S.C. Gwynne, who were among the first journalists
- to seize on the serpentine elements of this global scandal.
- After writing nearly a score of penetrating TIME articles, Beaty
- and Gwynne took a six-month leave of absence and, working from
- 750 lbs. of documents and notes, transformed a forbiddingly
- complex news story into a dramatic account of one of the most
- alarming criminal conspiracies of modern times.
- </p>
- <p> Among other arcana, much less susceptible to understanding
- than the B.C.C.I. scandal, is the question that plagues
- cosmologists: How did the universe grow into its present form?
- Did it all start with the Big Bang, or the Great Void? The Great
- Attractor, or the Great Wall? Science writer Michael D. Lemonick
- follows this adventure of discovery in The Light at the Edge of
- the Universe (Villard), which will be published next month.
- While the answers still elude cosmologists, Lemonick's chronicle
- draws us compellingly into these mysteries. Together with his
- colleagues, he demonstrates how responsible journalism can
- create a Big Bang of its own.
- </p>
- <p> Elizabeth Valk Long
- </p>
-
- </body>
- </article>
- </text>
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