Allen Guttman, in Jour-rial of Sport History (Summer 19811, North American Society for Sport His- tory, 101 White Building, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pa. 16802.
Mindlessly partisan, doltishly passive, prone to abusiveness, drink, and riot-such has been the image of the sports fan for hundreds of years. Tertullian, the second-century Church Father, railed against the ex- cesses of the Circus-goer. More recently, neo-Marxists have condemned Western spectator sports as a dehumanizing...
pitting 10,000 beasts against the same number of gladiators. Often, though, the games were overshadowed fierce feuding, drinking, courting, and rioting in the stands. Fans in Jus- tinian's Constantinople burned down their wooden coliseum four times between 491 and 532 A.D.
Medieval spectators were far less unruly, perhaps because of the smaller scale of events and the narrower social gap between players and viewers. Tournaments of knights, beginning as wild and rough 'mimic wars" in the 12th...
consensus-"Nan had a pad. Nan had a tan pad. Dad ran. Dad ran to the pad."-are hardly the stuff of epics. Bored, children "read them with less facility," said the authors. "Publishers, in re- sponse, make the books even simpler."
Other attempts to spice up textbooks have, in fact, worked against reading. Some publishers have doubled the space devoted to illustra- tions, making the printed text even less appealing comparison. Others emphasize play; in one well-known...
Smith, novelist Scott Spencer (Endless Love, 1979) believes society has lost its commitment to children. To- day's youth must compete with the "narcissistic lifestyles" of adults. Children sense they can no longer be "afforded" and, claims Spencer, in a final act of obedience, oblige their parents killing themselves.
PRESS & TELEVISION
"Suing Media for Libel: A Litigation
Study" by Marc A. Franklin, in American
Bar Foundation Research Journal (Sum-
mer 198...
C. R. Eisendrath, in
Michigan ~&rt& Review (Fall 1981),
3032 Rackham Bldg., University of
Michigan, Ann Arbor, Mich. 48109,
Had French laws concerning the press been applied in the United States, the Watergate story, the Pentagon Papers, critical accounts of the Vietnam War, and most reports about Senator Edward Kennedy's Chappaquidick accident might never have appeared. So writes Eisen- drath, communications professor at the University of Michigan.
There are 46 "exempted subjects"...
Robert N. Bellah, in Teachers College Rec- ord (Fall 198 I), Teachers College, Coium-
the Good Society bia University. 525 West 120th St.. New York, N.Y. 10027
The early Greek philosophers openly debated what a society's goals should be. But since the time of Niccolo Machiavelli (1469- 1527), social theorists have repeatedly professed to pure objectivity. Their claims are misleading, contends Bellah, a Berkeley sociologist.
Machiavelli claimed he described how the world was, not how it should...
Anne Carr, in Theology Today (Oct. 1981), Princeton IS God? Theological Seminary, P.O. Box 29,
Princeton, N.J. 08540.
During the 1960s, "God is dead" became a major, and controversial, precept for many Christian theologians. Two decades later, leading Western and Third World theologians are proclaiming, a la Mark Twain, that such rumors were very much exaggerated. These scholars -e.g., Edward Schillebeeckx, Hans Kung, Karl Rahner-argue, how-ever, that images of God must change substantially...
Patrick J. Ryan, in Jour-
nal of Religion in Africa (vol. 11, no. 3, and African gods 1980), E. J. Brill, Oudi Rijn 33a-35,
Leiden, The Netherlands.
When North African Muslims first ventured into black West Africa around AD. 1000, they were appalled that the natives seemed to wor- ship many gods. About 500 years later, Christian explorers were simi- larly dismayed. Only in this century have anthropologists recognized the region's long tradition of belief in a single Supreme Being, reports Ryan,...
George 01-shevsky, in Science Digest (Aug.1981),224 West 57th St., New York,N.Y. 10019.
Remembered today for slumping world economies and higher oil prices, the 1970s were nonetheless boom years for dinosaur hunters, reports Olshevsky, a freelance science writer. During the decade, some 20 percent of the 300-odd known dinosaur genera were discovered. As a result, paleontologists are revising their views of the "terrible lizards" who ruled the Earth before suddenly vanishing 64 million...
Joel M. Weisberg, Joseph H.
Taylor, and Lee A. Fowler, in Scientific
American (Oct. 198 I), 415 Madison Ave.,
New York, N.Y. 10017.
An object 15,000 light-years from Earth has provided "the first strong evidence" for Albert Einstein's theory of gravity, a central component of his general theory of relativity. So report Weisberg and Taylor, physicists at Princeton, and Fowler, a physicist at Atmospheric and Environmental Research, Inc. of Cambridge, Mass.
Einstein (1879-1955) held...