"Missed Moorings" Nicholas Lernann, in The Washington Monthly (Feb. 1986), 1711 Connecticut Ave. N.W., Washington, D.C. 20009.
Experience provides the raw material of good fiction. It is no accident that many major American novelists had, at some point in their lives, vocations other than writing. Mark Twain and Herman Melville piloted ships. John Steinbeck worked as a farm hand. Ernest Herningway drove an ambulance during World War I.
But what has happened since World War II? wonders...
contrast, White Noise merely furthers the view popular among the nation's literati that "American life is unreal and sterile for the middle class and degrading for the working class."
One reason for such rejection, Lemann suggests, is that even best- selling American novelists do not receive the attention they once did. Forced to compete with television and other media, all but the most popu- lar novels sell fewer and fewer copies each year. As Lemann observes, "a writer who thinks...
William V.
Shannon, in Foreign Affairs(Spring 1986), 58
East 68th St., New York, N.Y. 10021.
On November 15,1985, prime ministers Margaret Thatcher of Britain and Garret FitzGerald of Ireland signed the so-called Anglo-Irish agreement, a pact officially recognizing Dublin as a partner, alongside London, in the governance of Northern Ireland, or Ulster.
Granting the Irish Free State a voice in the administration of Northern Ireland's police force, courts, and prisons, the agreement marked a major...
Michael F. Lofchie, in Current History (May 1986), 3740 Creamery Rd., Furlong, Pa. 18925.
Plagued drought, famine, and political turmoil, the nations of sub-Sahara Africa have dashed the hopes of many Western economists in recent years.
AH except Kenya, that is. Thanks to a strong agrarian economy, writes Lofchie, a political scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, Kenya is "an African success story.'
Over the last decade, Kenya's agricultural sector has enjoyed an aver-...
Africans, converting it from communal or group ownership to private plots. refusing to subsidize urban nsum-ers with artificially low food prices, Nairobi has provided its farmers with a powerful incentive to increase their output. Export-crop production has nearly doubled since the late 1970s.
The present boom in world coffee prices, owing largely to a drought in Brazil, bodes well for Kenya's economic future. But difficulties loom ahead. While the country's overall gross domestic product has...
presidents Luis Alberto Monge Alvarez (1982-86) and Arias to avoid di- rect conflict with the Sandinistas have not gone over well with the Reagan administration either.
Reding worries'that -Costa Rican democracy may suffer in the long run from the Reagan administration's attempt to use Costa Rica in the struggle against the Sandinistas. In trying to change Costa Rica's antimilitarism, Washington may instead tip its own ally off balance.
"Pakistan: Testing Time for the New Order" William...
This is the century of spies. Yet, though Carre's talents cry out to be employed in they are said to be almost everywhere, the creation of a real novel." Burgess we seldom see them, except on televi- went on to lament "the myth that the sion, giving press conferences, or being only literature the British can produce led, in manacles, from car to courtroom. on a world scale is sub-art about spies." Knowing that most of the successful One can hear in these remarks more ones work in...
public agencies and private institutions
"American Professors: A National Resource Imperiled."
Oxford University Press, 200 Madison Aye., New York, N.Y. 10016. 322 pp. $24.95. Authors: Howard R. Bowen and Jack H. Schuster
American colleges and universities are caught between a rock and a hard place. Not only must they contend with a shrink- ing demographic pool of students, but ac- cording to Bowen and Schuster, professors of economics and public policy, respec- tively, at Claremont Gr...
Peter Paret with Gordon A. Craig and Felix Gilbert Princeton, 1986 941 pp. $45