By Philip Larkin
Edited by Anthony Twaite. Farrar. 330 pp.
822.50
By Thomas P. Hughes. Viking. 529 pp. $24.95
By Sherwin B. Nuland. Knopf. 519 pp. $24.95
By Charles Murray and Catherine
Bly Cox. Simon & Schuster. 512 pp. $24.95
looking at the
revolution it was not: Contrasting the American and the French
revolutions, he sheds light on both. Political scientist and biogra-
pher Maurice Cranston examines the long-term effects of the
Revolution. Surveying its global legacies, Cranston uncovers a sig-
nificant irony: He finds a revolution whose consequences in its
own country were radically different from those it would pro-
duce, so explosively, throughout the rest of the world.
WQ SUMMER 1989
36
A D 0
Keith Mi...
iety
CA'S FIRST COCAINE EPIDEMIC
Only a decade ago, many prominent Americans tolerated and even touted the use of cocaine. From Capitol Hill to Wall Street, the young and moneyed set made the drug its favorite "leisure pharmaceutical." Some talked of decriminalizing the "harmless" white powder. But that changed after cocaine overdoses killed several celebrities-including Hollywood's John Belushi in 1982 and college basketball star Len Bias in 1986. Last year, the drug claimed 1...
Latin Ameri- can "magical realists," we also view postmodern television shows (David Letterman for the late-night crowd), eat postmodern food ("gourmet" macaroni- and-cheese served on microwaveable Fiestaware), sport postmodern clothes, and even think postmodern thoughts.
For all that, few of us know what the term really means, while others suspect, along with a Spy magazine writer, that it has "evolved into a sort of buzzword that people tack onto sentences when they're...
citizens), referendums (referred legis- latures), and recalls of elected officials.
Today, about half the states permit initiatives or referen- dums, or both. A 1987 Gallup survey showed that, by a mar- gin of 48 to 41 percent, Ameri- cans favor a Constitutional amendment to allow national referendums. During the 1980s, more than 200 initia- tives and 1,000 referendums have appeared on state ballots, on matters ranging from abor- tion to bond issues.
How has direct democracy worked for the states?...
once watched a man being kidnapped in Beirut. It took only a few seconds.
I was on my way to Beirut Interna- tional Airport when my taxi became stalled in traffic. Suddenly I saw off to my right four men with pistols tucked into their belts who were dragging another man out his front door. A woman, proba- bly his wife, was standing just inside the shadow of the door, clutching her bathrobe and weeping. The man was strug- gling and kicking with all his might, a look of sheer terror in his eyes. S...
FLECTIONS
A person spends almost his entire adult life quietly practicing the profes- sion, chemistry, for which he was trained, and finally he dies in the same house where he was born. What life could sound more tranquil? Yet when that life is interrupted, as Primo Levi's was, by the 20th centu- ry's ultimate horror, then such tranquility can only be superficial, a mockingly deceptive appearance. In 1943, fighting Fascists and Nazis as a Jewish-Italian partisan, Primo Levi was captured and deported...