many more things, notably infant mortality, than just the survival of more people beyond 85. There may be a natural limit to life, but it is not necessarily 85.
Indeed, University of Minnesota demog-
ARTS & LETTERS
rapher James Vaupel has scrutinized un- usually accurate Swedish data on 85-year- olds and found drastic improvements in remaining life expectancy during the past 50 years. The same is true for Swedes as old as 100. If there is a biological limit to life, Vaupel suggests, it m...
Beniamin Filene. in American Quarterly (Dec. 1991), Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 701 W. 40th St., Baltimore, Md. 2121 1.
Leadbelly, the black singer and guitarist among the most important of America's (1889-1949) who is now considered folk musicians, was first thrust into the
WQ SPRING 1992
129
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musical limelight John Lomax and his son, Alan. During the 1930s and early '40s, the Lomaxes traveled tens of thousands of miles and made thousands of recordings for the Library of Congress of...
John Lomax and his son, Alan. During the 1930s and early '40s, the Lomaxes traveled tens of thousands of miles and made thousands of recordings for the Library of Congress of obscure songs and singers. In time they won ac- claim for preserving America's endan- gered folk-music heritage. What has not been understood, says Filene, a Yale grad- uate student, is how much their personal vision, shaped the left-wing politics of the period, helped to define the very "tra- dition" they were purportedly...
"hack" writers rather than "name" authors.
The popularity of sci-fi movies and TV
OTHER NATIONS
shows has been of little help to writers of original science fiction, Disch says. Most hit sci-fi movies of recent years have been written "director-writer-producer teams who have dealt with [science fic- tion] as a pool of imagery, tropes, and plots in the public domain, which can be cobbled together as well by one creative team asby another."
Many veteran science-fiction w...
overwhelming margins in some areas with heavy concentrations of im- migrants-has achieved a national importance that a similar extremist party in the United States would find hard to win. Ethnic and racial concerns play no small role in American poli- tics, of course, but "the politics of integration or ex- clusion" in France, Horo-
Jean-Marie Le Pen, of the anti-immigrant Front National, was him- witz says, has "a bluntness self a key issue in 1988 elections in which Francois M...
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