SPECTIVES
The enduring popularity of Charles Dickens (1812-70) in the West is nowhere more evident than in America. All of his novels from Pick~~vick
Papers to The Mystery of Edwin Drood, are readily available in good bookstores, and there has been a recent surge of scholarly interest in England's muckraking novelist. Recently published have been a new biography, Dickens: A Life, by Nor- man and Jeanne MacKenzie; a revised paperback edition of Edgar Johnson's Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triuinph;...
-a treaty of mutual defense-will be broken. Washington now formally rec- ognizes the regime in Peking as "China." Yet, for almost three decades, the United States was anti-Communist Taiwan's indis- pensable ally. The Americans supplied the late Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist regime with military backing, money, and, in the UN, support for its claim to represent all China. Can Taiwan's prosperous people survive the rupture with Washington? Here, Taiwan scholar Parris Chang...
from the Com- munists on the mainland:
"For the stubborn aging (63)leader, the flight across the sampan-flecked Strait of Formosa was a time for bitter remembrance. . . . He had broken warlords, checked an early international Communist conspiracy, survived Japanese aggression, only to go down before IMao Zedong's armies] and the corruption which grew up in his own wartorn regime. . . . Chiang would try to fight on Formosa though the U.S. and British governments had written off the strategic...
's shape and position- slightly askew, off the southeast coast of China-suggests noth-ing so much as a ship adrift, isolated, vulnerable to storm and tide. No one now takes seriously the old, persistent claims of Taiwan's government-in-exile to sovereignty over the mainland. The island's one-time allies and sometime friends dwindle in number, as rich and poor nations alike hasten to curry favor with the vast People's Republic across the Strait. Jimmy Car- ter's administration is only the latest...
writes in
U.S.
Aid to Taiwan: A Study of For- eign Aid, Self-Help, and Develop- ment (Praeger, 1966), the annual gain in GNP per dollar of U.S. aid was higher in Taiwan during the 1960s than in Korea, the Philippines, or Turkey. In Jacoby's view, Wash- ington "wisely" fostered local pri- vate enterprise and eschewed using
U.S.
aid as "leverage" to force politi-
cal reform in 1950-65. Perhaps no single action Chiang Kai-shek was more important than his American-financed "lan...
Devotees of sports hail a "Golden Age" almost as often as book publishers herald a "major literary event." Still, the pres- ent era is as good a contender for the title as any. Endorsements by sports stars can mean money in the bank for shaving cream manufacturers or the margin of victory for ambitious politi- cians. Professional athletes are themselves amply represented in Washington by, among others, Senator Bill Bradley (D.-N.J.), late of the New York Knicks, and Representative...
On May 17, 1939, when there were barely 400 working tele- vision sets in the United States, station W2XBS of New York produced the first live telecast of a sporting contest-the Columbia-Princeton baseball contest for fourth place in the Ivy League. The quality of broadcast was poor; a New York Times reviewer wrote, "The players were best described by observers as appearing 'like white flies' running across the screen." The sportscaster, Bill Stern, didn't know when to keep his mouth...
'I find more genuine religion at the baseball match than I do at my father's church on Fifth Avenue," Ernest Howard Crosby, the 19th-century New York social reformer, is said to have remarked. This observation may also apply, for some, to football and basketball, the other two American sports that are public liturgies as well as games.
For certain sports are rather like religions-not like Chris- tianity, Judaism, Islam, or any of the world's other great faiths, but forms of secular religion...
the colonists long be- fore Independence.
Regional differences soon became apparent. Opposition to horse rac-ing, primarily because it promoted gan~bling, was strong in Puritan- minded New England. The sport thrived in the South. Diomed, the first American racing steed to gain wide renown, was brought from Eng- land in 1798, and the American Turf Register, launched in Baltimore in 1829, was America's first sporting magazine.
In the splendidly illustrated 200 Years of Sport in America: A Pageant...