It s Me Again Margaret by Ian Whitcomb
IN SHORT
See the article in its original context from
January 22, 1984
,
Section 7 , Page
23Buy Reprints
TimesMachine is an exclusive do good for domicile delivery and digital subscribers.
About the Archive
This is a digitized version of an commodity from The Times'due south print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. To preserve these manufactures as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them.
Occasionally the digitization procedure introduces transcription errors or other bug; we are continuing to work to improve these archived versions.
FICTION
THE DAMROSCH DYNASTY: America's Kickoff Family of Music. By George Martin. (Houghton Mifflin, $29.95.) Leopold Damrosch, who came to America from Germany in 1871, founded the New York Symphony, which was afterwards merged into the New York Philharmonic, and the Oratorio Lodge of New York, which even so sings. His son Walter was a conductor who persuaded Andrew Carnegie to build Carnegie Hall and who became a famous radio personality. Leopold's other son, Frank, founded what became the Juilliard Schoolhouse. His girl, Clara, a pianist, married a violinist named David Mannes; together they founded what is now the Mannes College of Music. George Martin acknowledges that no member of the Damrosch-Mannes family was a great musician, simply he presents them convincingly as a prodigious tribe of musical organizers, educators, taste-cultivators and establishment-builders. ''The Damrosch Dynasty'' deals illuminatingly with the assimilation of immigrants and their civilization into American life, the relationship between high fine art and big money and, higher up all, the nifty change in values that has occurred over the terminal century. Meanwhile, family relationships are lovingly evoked. Impressionable children become powerful adults, then turn down into sometime age, as in a skilful old- fashioned novel. As the years become by, the cast of characters gets larger and larger, but Mr. Martin advisedly documents the story and keeps it remarkably articulate. Anyone interested in the social history of classical music in America will want to read this intelligent and charming book, simply it deserves a wider audition also.
- Julius Novick
* Man SLAUGHTER. Past Steven Englund (Doubleday, $17.95.) On the morning time of March 25, 1977, Jennifer Patri shot and killed her estranged hubby, who had come to pick up their two daughters. She then fix burn to their Wisconsin farmhouse, drove to North Dakota to nourish a pig breeders' fair and returned the next twenty-four hours to confess her criminal offence. In a nationally publicized trial she was found guilty of manslaughter, apparently driven to murder past her abusive, philandering husband. Initially sympathetic to Mrs. Patri'south plight, Steven Englund began to doubt her motives during the course of researching ''Man Slaughter.'' Several inconsistencies in the defense'south instance, likewise every bit the inability of witnesses to cite incidents of physical abuse across ''a few arm twists,'' convinced him that Mrs. Patri was not a battered wife. Nonetheless, he does allow that she may have perceived herself to be one and admits that ''no one tin offer an authoritative judgment of what happened because the question of subjective perception is so critical.'' In spite of this qualification, Mr. Englund boldly concludes that Mrs. Patri murdered her hubby out of jealousy over his relationship with a more vivacious, prettier adult female. Ironically, he bases this exclamation largely on the ''subjective perception'' of Mr. Patri'southward woman friend. Yet he doesn't reveal why he chooses one interpretation of events over some other, and this omission weakens the book's credibility. - Carol Verderese
* A DIALOGUE ON COMPARABLE WORTH. By Michael Evan Gold. (ILR Press, Material, $14. Paper, $7.50.) The question under discussion here is whether women are underpaid for the piece of work they exercise. Information technology is not the question of equal pay for equal work - an important distinction. Michael Evan Gold has written a dialogue between an advocate who believes women are underpaid and a critic who does non. Points, counterpoints and interruptions are presented as though an actual fence were in progress. The advocate notes that female workers earn nearly 59 cents for every dollar that male workers practise. This figure is challenged by the critic, but the advocate buttresses his example past telling how the United States Civil Rights Committee arrived at it. The advocate then argues that pervasive sexual discrimination exists, that some piece of work is devalued just because it is done by women and that conscientious analyses of occupations reveals the justice of equal pay for comparable jobs. The critic contends that women expect to ally, practise non invest in career training, accept lower paying jobs that are hands found and easily returned to after childbearing and are not forced to become secretaries rather than plumbers. All this is countered past the advocate'southward simply citing the number of single women and mothers who work. The critic also predicts disaster for the economy and more than government interference in the private sector if a concept such as comparable worth should become police. The advocate notes that the aforementioned predictions were fabricated when slavery ended and blacks entered the labor market place. It is hard to summarize so elegant and intricate a set of arguments. Moreover, the worth of this slim volume goes beyond its of import bailiwick. Information technology is a monument to svelte writng every bit a path to clear thinking. - GraceAnne A. DeCandido
* LEMON SWAMP AND OTHER PLACES: A Carolina Memoir. By Mamie Garvin Fields with Karen Fields. (Free Press/Macmillan, $16.75.) In 1971, South Carolina'south Woman of the Year was Mamie Garvin Fields, a distinguished citizen of Charleston whose grandparents had been slaves. Narrated in her own snappy, intelligent vocalism, ''Lemon Swamp and Other Places,'' which goes from the 1890'southward to the 1940'southward and from Charleston to Harlem, is the high-spirited memoir of a adult female who desired to ameliorate herself by every means. The quest for learning in her family began with a distant African uncle who - miraculously - had attended Oxford while serving as a valet to his white master's sons. His education was passed along to other slaves on the sly. In her own fourth dimension, cypher inspired Mrs. Fields to action quicker than displays of white superiority or blackness subservience. Mrs. Fields determined from the showtime to acquire a merchandise (seamstress - with a weakness for stylish hats) in addition to a profession (didactics). Unstintingly, humorously, she helped people amend themselves, insisting, for instance, that they fight for their newly won correct to a minimum wage. Mrs. Fields has a great capacity for joy. Her memory sings of the days of her courtship and of holidays spent on her grandfather'south farm, where she learned about country life and his youth as a slave. Her memoirs demonstrate a grapheme of special grace. - Margaret Peters
* Rock ODYSSEY: A Musician's Chronicle of the Sixties. By Ian Whitcomb. (Dolphin/Doubleday, Paper, $10.95.) Ian Whitcomb, a passionate blues, rock and ragtime enthusiast with a distant concrete resemblance to Mick Jagger, was a history pupil at Trinity College, Dublin, when his dreams of pop-record stardom were suddenly realized. After his novelty record, ''Yous Turn Me On,'' hitting the American Top Ten in 1965, he became a teen-age idol for a day. ''The American people elevated me to fame with a trifle, a slice of piffle knocked off in a fit of absenteeism of mind,'' he laments in this breezy memoir of his momentary celebrity. Two years afterward, he was playing the ukulele in a California pizza parlor. And afterwards producing Mae West's ''Great Assurance of Fire'' anthology, he left the music business birthday. The whirlwind of Mr. Whitcomb's fleeting fame, which swept him from Los Angeles to Paris with such groups every bit the Beach Boys, the Kinks and the Byrds, is the focus of this lively chronicle of the years 1963-67, when rock-and-curlicue exploded into a major growth manufacture. Effectually his story, Mr. Whitcomb has constructed a thorough and engrossing history of the mid-lx'southward stone scene - in England and in Los Angeles - that mixes first-manus impressions with meticulous scholarship. Mr. Whitcomb's colorful and precise descriptions of music are impressive, and his pop sociology (particularly his evocation of Hollywood's slick underside and his autopsy of ''swinging London'') is acute. The only of import missing piece is the growth of Motown Records. Merely even with its small lapses, ''Rock Odyssey'' is the best-written personal chronicle nosotros take of the period. - Stephen Holden
* THE POVERTY OF AFFLUENCE: A Psychological Portrait of the American Way of Life. By Paul L. Wachtel. (Free Printing/Macmillan, $19.95.) Paul L. Wachtel, a clinical psychologist and the writer of ''Psychoanalysis and Behavior Therapy,'' challenges a central tenet - growth is good - of American culture and history. Americans, he says, take grown so used to continual improvement in their lives that ''not having more has become equivalent to having less.'' Having argued, basically, that coin can't buy happiness, Mr. Wachtel looks effectually to run across what tin can. ''I would like,'' he writes, ''to see less emphasis on the economic dimension of our lives - growth, productivity, the creation of needs for more and more than goods, the 'bottom line' - and more than on the psychological: the richness of subjective feel and the quality of human relationships.'' His boldest proposal is to put out of work all those whose jobs do not serve the public good - corporate lobbyists who fight pollution control and auto executives more concerned with coin than safety, for example. These newly unemployed, who would so be supported by public funds, would not take ''ceased to exist productive. . . . They would be the front end-line troops who bear the burden of the struggle to live by a more sensible gear up of values.'' ''Nothing,'' he writes, ''is equally na"ively utopian as continuing on our nowadays grade . . . and hoping for a deus ex machina under the name of 'engineering science' to bail united states out at the last infinitesimal.'' Perhaps nothing is that utopian, but Mr. Wachtel'due south proposals come close. - Hal Goodman
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/1984/01/22/books/in-short-175024.html
0 Response to "It s Me Again Margaret by Ian Whitcomb"
Post a Comment