Word: essays
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Black Music: Four Lives, a classic in the field of jazz literature, was conceived largely as a work of sociology. Unfortunately, The Jazz Makers is not so varied, informative, or readable as its alluring format. While it is impossible to capture a great creative spirit in a short essay, most of the writers involved in this project did not even limit their subjects effectively. Only George Avakian and John S. Wilson focus their works sufficiently. Avakian details the cultural process that changed Louis Armstrong from jazz's first great improviser to a grinning but unartistic national hero, then muses briefly...
Strobe Talbott's cynical Essay on "The Dilemma of Dealing with Dictators" [Sept. 24] clearly shows why we are so hated among the Third World nations. Talbott spends all his time telling us which despots we should back and which we should discard, according to our best interests. When a tyrant is no longer useful to us, we should invoke human rights. Only in the last two lines of his Essay does Talbott remember that the people in the distressed countries should have something to say about their own destiny...
...these recommendations, though, can't compete with Sagan's and his editor's mistakes. The main problem lies in Broca's Brain's construction. Sagan strings loosely together 25 of his essays--published in everything from Physics Today to Holiday magazine--only one of which is more than 15 pages long. The book is hence painfully disjointed; he leaps from topic to topic at random. Redundancy creeps in--a theme introduced in one essay is often uselessly repeated in a second, and not infrequently beaten into the ground in a third. Most seriously, though, these essays are just too short...
There should be more of this: instead we sense only a continual jolting as Sagan bumps us from essay to essay...
...line with this, Sagan's watchword is a citation from Bertrand Russell: "William James used to preach the will to doubt." This is, of course, a sound scientific viewpoint. What's awry in Broca's Brain is that Segan doesn't practice this, save for one chapter. His essay on Emmanuel Velikovsky takes a once popular but porous theory explaining a series of converging mythological catastrophes and subjects it to an exacting analysis. This piece, three times as long as any other, is the most interesting, the most developed, and certainly the most scientifically responsible in the book...