Word: reader
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...light entertainment, Sobel has manufactured an obsessive parlor game. He is a master pedant who, without cracking a smile, plods through heavily footnoted mock details of North America's internal and external struggles from 1775 to the present. Indeed, there is so much beady-eyed detail that a reader can argue as well about the C.N.A.'s 1966 election (Carter Monaghan, of the People's Coalition, beats his liberal opponent easily) as about the French Revolution. As for the latter, it never happened because the crushing of the American rebellion left revolutionary spirit in France too feeble...
...coherent ethics, compared to which Richmond's counterculture is a veritable jungle. The sexism is vicious, the community is haphazard, and the allegiance is nil. Still the author insists on romanticizing the squalor, to the extent where any of its exposure begins to look like the work of the reader. The sexism, in particular, was quite certainly not intended as such, and while I found it sick, and not even good pornographically, there is no doubt in my mind but that Richmond has only a celebration of healthy sexuality in mind...
...notion for such a soggy fantasy to be advancing; that the solution to the problem is, forget it, fix it later, is not. What does it matter if the world blows up, after all, if we have the happy valley, Methuselah-like longevity, and Burt Bacharach and the Reader's Digest to teach us the better...
...best interviews are with two writers who are still almost unknown in the U.S. Octavio Paz, Mexico's most distinguished poet and essayist (TIME, Jan. 29), impresses the reader as one of the most provocative thinkers in the West. Gracefully, lucidly, he talks of topics as diverse as the rebellion of modern youth ("an explosion of despair"), the art of Marcel Duchamp, Sade's philosophy ("His model is not a volcano, although he liked volcanoes very much, but cold lava"). Paz even notes the first feminist, Penthesilea, legendary queen of the Amazons, who ruled from "a throne...
...Gendzier succumbs to what amounts to a left-wing psychic disorder in its own right: the compulsion to pursue and defend Fanon's reputation through increasingly irrelevant intricacies. She does this in a prose crippled by repetition and neo-Marxist jargon. Fanon himself quickly escapes her-and the reader is glad to follow him. · Horace Judson