Word: reader
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...Reader T. Steven Lale [June 21] objected to the "bearded, psychedelic 'freak out' " on your cover, representing the class of '68 [June 7]. I have met many people like Reader Lale. And behind their defense of faceless conformity lies a paralyzing fear. Fear of change. Fear of humor. And fear of disturbing their comfortable, fuzzy thinking. I, too, deplore the self-indulgent hedonism and head-in-the-sand anarchy gaining ground among youth today. But an ostrich is an ostrich, whether a soft-brained young anarchist or a soft-living non-think suburbanite. These birds may look...
...Politics. First and last, Lynd is a moralizer. For all his meticulous scholarship, his instinct is to reduce American history to a series of black and white questions. Ought we to tolerate slavery? Should we fight unjust wars? Are we revering property more than people? To these questions, the reader seems to hear echoing between the lines Lynd's own answers: Civil rights. Pacifism. Socialism. Seeing less the tangled events than the abstracted issues, Lynd has composed not so much a position paper as a posture paper for the New Left. This is the politics of righteousness, or moral...
Perhaps the pervasive influence of Freudianism has been felt most perversely in the genre of the thriller. Time was when characters were simply good or bad, threatening or threatened. But nowadays it is difficult to tell a real villain from a societal victim; too often the bewildered reader is caught between a hard shudder of fear and a soft sigh of compassion...
There are great stretches, also, of correspondence that seems so haphazardly selected and placed that a reader sometimes seems to be looking over mail piled up during a vacation-mixed in with announcements for sales long past. At other times the effect is one of protective padding: there are only 113 pages of text, compared with 270 pages of correspondence...
What most captivates the reader is the fascination of discovering how her brittle sensibilities and flamboyant neuroses react to events. Her meticulous eyewitness account of the scruffy San Francisco hippie subculture becomes all the more engrossing for the mingled feelings of anger, pain and horror that the entire experience caused her. Miss Didion suffers constantly, but compellingly and magically. With testiness, she reports on the vulgarity of Las Vegas weddings. With sad humor, she tells of a visit to Joan Baez's Institute for the Study of Nonviolence. With annoyance, she relates the legends surrounding Howard Hughes. With nostalgia...