MYTH AND TRAGEDY IN ANCIENT
GREECE. By Jean-Pierre Vemant and Pierre
Vidal-Naquet. Translated by Janet Lloyd. Zone
Books. 527 pp. $28.95
MYTH AND SOCIETY IN ANCIENT
GREECE. By Jean-Pierre Vernant. Translated
by Janet Lloyd. Zone Books. 279 pp. $22.95
By Stanley Ayling. St. Martin's. 316 pp. $19.95
By Peter Brown. Columbia. 504 pp. $45
S. Frederick Starr
Areforming crusade grips the USSR. previous waves of reform in their own Enthusiasts of change call for new country. Newly published memoirs of the laws, new economic mechanisms, Khrushchev "thaw" (1956-64) find avid even a new and more independent national readers in Moscow. Gorbachev himself of- psychology in place of the old conformism. ten hails the era of Lenin's New Economic What Gorbachev calls "rapid transforma- Policy (1921-28) as a pattern for the tions...
Areforming crusade grips the USSR. previous waves of reform in their own Enthusiasts of change call for new country. Newly published memoirs of the laws, new economic mechanisms, Khrushchev "thaw" (1956-64) find avid even a new and more independent national readers in Moscow. Gorbachev himself of- psychology in place of the old conformism. ten hails the era of Lenin's New Economic What Gorbachev calls "rapid transforma- Policy (1921-28) as a pattern for the tions in all spheres...
ight months in the Soviet capital left me convinced that perestroika, Gorbachev's "restructuring" of the
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Soviet economy, remains a phantom. It has not yet touched the average Russian. If a political rival to ~orbachev were to look his countrymen square in the eye and ask, as Ronald Reagan once did in a somewhat different context, "Are you better off now than you were three years ago?", the an- swer would be a reverberating "No."
Perestroika is, as Soviet citizens t...
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The origins of the first Russian state remain a mystery. Scholars differ over whether the early Rus' people were descended from Nordic in- vaders or tribal Slavs from southern Russia, as Nicholas Riasanovsky notes in A History of Russia (Oxford, 1984). What is clear is that the Rus' were first united by the warrior-princes of Kiev during the ninth century. One of these princes, Vladimir (980- 101 5), converted the Kievan Rus' to Orthodox Christianity in 988, "thus opening the gates for...
Jean-Paul Sartre was a professional phi- losopher who also sought to preach to a mass audience. For a time at least it looked as though he had succeeded. Certainly no philosopher this century has had so direct an impact on the minds and attitudes of so many human beings, especially young peo- ple, all over the world. Existentialism was the popular philosophy of the late 1940s and 1950s. His plays were hits. His books sold in enormous quantities, some of them over two million copies in France alone....
Carolyn Webber
The art of taxation, wrote Jean-warfare and standing armies-far the Baptiste Colbert, an adviser to greatest expense of government until re-France's Louis XIV, "consists in so cent times. During this century, especially plucking the goose as to obtain the largest since World War 11, tax burdens have possible amount of feathers with the small- grown dramatically, and taxation has ac-est possible amount of hissing." quired two new uses: "stabilizing" domes-
Over...
The art of taxation, wrote Jean-warfare and standing armies-by far the Baptiste Colbert, an adviser to greatest expense of government until re-France's Louis XIV, "consists in so cent times. During this century, especially plucking the goose as to obtain the largest since World War 11, tax burdens have possible amount of feathers with the small- grown dramatically, and taxation has ac-est possible amount of hissing." quired two new uses: "stabilizing" domes-
Over the centuries,...