Word: odyssey
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...epic has so thoroughly captured the imagination of men through the ages as blind Homer's tale of the siege and sack of Troy. Yet many classical scholars and archaeologists have long suspected that the Iliad and the Odyssey are far more laudable as poetry than as history. The latest skepticism about the poet's recounting of the Trojan War comes from a distinguished German classicist, Dr. Helmut Berve, who has spent most of his life studying ancient Greece. Disturbed by what he calls a "readiness to believe in the historical core behind all myths, especially...
...strength of David Halberstam's The Unfinished Odyssey of Robert Kennedy (Random House; $4.95) lies in a felicity of language and a feeling for the political and social unease in the U.S. as the election of 1968 approached. (Halberstam, now 35 and an editor of Harper's magazine, won a Pulitzer prize for his 1963 New York Times coverage of Viet Nam.) He begins his account in the late summer of 1967 with a meeting between Bobby and Allard Lowenstem, a leader of the gathering anti-Johnson forces. He follows the Senator through his doomed campaign, ending with...
...literary flair, Halberstam's Odyssey lacks the historical detail of 55 Days-The Last Campaign of Robert Kennedy, by Jules Witcover (Putnam's; $6.95). As chief political writer for the Newhouse newspapers, Witcover, 41, saw more of the campaign than Halberstam, and what he failed to see he diligently traced through those who did. Written chronologically (from January 1968 through the June funeral), 85 Days abounds in unreported behind-the-scenes incidents and anecdotes. The author notes, for example, that Kennedy seriously urged TV Newscaster Walter Cronkite to run for Senator in New York. He vividly re-creates...
...choice of pushing on out toward the stars, much as the "classic" science fiction writers had depicted us. Or we could, as a species of intelligent beings, tool up for--well, something else. Maybe it is, as one of the reviewers of "2001--A Space Odyssey" seems to think, a Teilhard du Chardin-like leap of consciousness, a transfiguration into an all-pervasive incorporeal intelligence. Perhaps it is something not nearly so romantic; maybe just learning to like and respect each other and beginning to live on this planet at peace with ourselves...
Eric Siegel, 25, who built his first closed-circuit TV system out of spare parts ten years ago, showed a 21-minute tape of classical and Beatles music accompanied by glowing visual abstractions that he dubs Psychedelevision in Color. Closer to Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey than to Walt Disney's Fantasia, it is the sort of work that might well fill the extra channels on the cable antenna systems of the future. Eager to "take the waste out of the wasteland," Thomas Tadlock, 28, spent two years and a patron...