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TIME: Almanac 1990
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1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso
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051589
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05158900.060
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1990-09-22
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BOOKS, Page 81Bookends
GOLDWYN
by A. Scott Berg
Knopf; 579 pages; $24.95
His malapropisms -- calling the French painter "Toujours
Lautrec," asking some fellow schemers to "include me out" of a deal
-- gained Samuel Goldwyn a perverse fame as the archetypal
Hollywood immigrant mogul, crude and semiliterate. But as A. Scott
Berg demonstrates in this readable, richly researched biography,
Goldwyn was never an archetypal anything, except in his poor Jewish
origins in Eastern Europe. Unlike the Mayers and Warners, he made
relatively few films, and he never built a mighty empire with a
huge star roster and an immense distribution network. He was the
ultimate independent producer, with a compulsive need for autonomy
and control ("I made Wuthering Heights," he once said. "(William)
Wyler only directed it").
In Berg's account, Goldwyn's radical self-reliance had
something like the nobility of a tragic flaw. His two marriages
were deeply troubled, and as a father he was sometimes cruelly
distant. What sustained and transformed his life were his simple,
almost innocent, aspirations. His movies at their tasteful,
well-crafted best (Dodsworth, The Westerner, The Best Years of Our
Lives) had the kind of polished literacy the immigrant lad could
not himself command but could command others to produce on his
behalf.
WE ARE STILL MARRIED
by Garrison Keillor
Viking; 330 pages; $18.95
Garrison Keillor is still best known as the host, head minstrel
and founding fabulist of public radio's weekly Prairie Home
Companion, which went off the air almost two years ago. But the
shock, for a radio fan leafing through this collection, is to
discover, perhaps not for the first or fifth time, that his hero
is even more gifted as writer than as entertainer. In a superb
story called What Did We Do Wrong?, the first woman major-league
baseball player hits .300 but slobbers tobacco juice, gives fans
the finger and can't deal with the hot-breathed lunacy of a
nation's love. In Meeting Famous People, a country-music star is
hunted down and sued, then jailed and beaten after he refuses a
fan's request for a handshake. In the title sketch, an ordinary
couple become celebrities, in a way that seems chilling and
entirely possible, when PEOPLE magazine, the morning babble shows
and a congressional subcommittee hold their marriage up for
universal inspection. If Kafka were writing this spooky stuff, you
would call it Keilloresque, but it wouldn't be nearly so funny.
PLAYMATES
by Robert B. Parker
Putnam; 222 pages; $17.95
Somebody on the Taft University basketball team is shaving
points, the rumor goes, and Spenser, the soft-centered hard-guy
detective, soon discovers a grubbier scandal. Nobody at Taft will
admit it, but the team's star power forward has been passed through
his courses for nearly four years despite the fact that he can't
read. Spenser is shocked -- he believes in truth, honor and
grade-point averages -- and he sets out to discover which lizards,
tenured and not, are responsible. The reader puts up his feet and
gets comfortable. That's a bad sign. Too much comfort, too little
doubt. In the early Spenser books, everyone was edgy. Now hero,
victim and villains fit their roles a trifle too cozily. Is it time
for Spenser to retire and teach poetry at Taft?
FEEDING THE RAT
by A. Alvarez
Atlantic Monthly Press; 152 pages; $17.95
Mo Anthoine's rat, as he explains it to the author, is the
absurdly contrary impulse that drives him to leave environments
that are warm, horizontal and safe, and seek out predicaments that
are cold, perilous and vertical. Anthoine is a top English Alpinist
and Himalayan climber, and his rat has a huge appetite. A. Alvarez
relates that Anthoine was with the legendary Doug Scott, on a
24,000-ft. mountain in the Karakoram range in Kashmir, when Scott
broke both ankles and crawled toward camp for a week before his
rescue. When superclimbers speak of this sort of epic, it is hard
for weekend hikers to put it in perspective. Alvarez, an amateur
climber, provides a useful bridge for the imagination by telling
of two stiff climbs he did with his friend. He was stretched to the
limit; Anthoine, of course, was untroubled. Flatlanders who read
all this still will not understand why the rat gets hungry, but
armchair mountaineers will dream of glory.