home
***
CD-ROM
|
disk
|
FTP
|
other
***
search
/
TIME: Almanac 1990
/
1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso
/
time
/
042489
/
04248900.062
< prev
next >
Wrap
Text File
|
1990-09-17
|
4KB
|
86 lines
BOOKS, Page 88Bookends
DIFFICULTIES WITH GIRLS
by Kingsley Amis
Summit; 276 pages; $18.95
Patrick and Jenny Standish have just moved into a modern
apartment complex south of the Thames in London (faithful Amis
readers will recall the courtship of these two as recorded 29 years
ago in Take a Girl Like You). Patrick has stopped being a Latin
teacher and now works as an editor at a publishing house. After
nearly eight years of marriage, he is proving no match for the
temptations of swinging London in the '60s. His difficulties with
girls involve an inability to resist them. A new neighbor, Tim
Valentine, confesses to another sort of problem: an initial
enthusiasm followed immediately by unmanning apathy. He has decided
that he must be homosexual. Patrick's tasks include talking Tim out
of this idea and keeping his own marriage from foundering. The
author trots out these carnal misadventures with his usual comic
flair. Patrick is a typical Amis hero, a young fogy who finds much
of the world exasperating. Beneath the crackling surface, though,
lies a more somber tale of people behaving badly and, in most
cases, finally coming to their senses.
WORKING DAYS: THE JOURNALS OF THE GRAPES OF WRATH
by John Steinbeck
edited by Robert DeMott; Viking; 180 pages; $18.95
Published 50 years ago, The Grapes of Wrath has taken its place
among the handful of American novels (Uncle Tom's Cabin, The
Jungle) that changed public attitudes and policy. To mark its
golden anniversary, the book's original publisher has issued a new
edition (Viking; $25) and also the journals Steinbeck kept during
the five months (five months!) it took him to complete the
200,000-word manuscript.
The author, then 36, used these private notes as warm-up
exercises for the day's work. He gave himself pep talks: "This must
be a good book. It simply must. I haven't any choice." To readers
today, the fascination of this document rests in its portrait of
an artist at the peak of his skills. Steinbeck's outrage at the
mistreatment of Dust Bowl migrants in California, which he had
witnessed firsthand, fused with his storytelling abilities to
produce the most powerful book he would ever write. It won him the
Pulitzer Prize and contributed mightily to his Nobel Prize in 1962.
Both exhilarated and exhausted after finishing the book, Steinbeck
wondered whether he would ever write so well again: "That part of
my life that made the Grapes is over."
WORDSTRUCK
by Robert MacNeil
Viking; 230 pages; $18.95
In this charming memoir, half of PBS's MacNeil/Lehrer news team
deftly links his early biography to the words and books he learned,
to connections made. Born in Montreal but raised mostly in Halifax,
Robert MacNeil was the son of a seagoing Mountie (in Canada's
equivalent of the Coast Guard) and a Nova Scotian mother who
delighted in reading aloud to her sons. MacNeil's first nonbaby
words were "gin fizz" -- the name of a teddy bear. He recalls being
amazed, on a rare trip aboard his father's corvette, that sailing
terms derived from Viking days (coxswain, starboard) still have a
defining role in modern navies. MacNeil's memories of Nova Scotia
have what D.H. Lawrence called a "spirit of place." In the book's
best pages, one can almost whiff the salty tang of fog descending
on proud, poky Halifax as winter comes.
SHARE OF HONOR
by Ralph Graves
Henry Holt; 454 pages; $19.95
The winds of war whip briskly through this novel of the
Philippines just before and during the Japanese occupation. Ralph
Graves, who knew the islands as the teenage stepson of the U.S.
High Commissioner during 1939-41, re-creates the prewar colonial
atmosphere, the swift arrival of the enemy after Pearl Harbor and
the struggle to survive until General Douglas MacArthur's
triumphant return. Graves, the last managing editor of the weekly
LIFE and a retired editorial director of Time Inc., deploys a
diverse cast of characters (American, Filipino and Japanese) whose
fates are joined in a narrative that combines the observations of
good journalism with the emotional impact of perceptive fiction.