Random Notes

More September Titles: In The Winding Passage: Essays and Sociological Journeys 1960-1980 (Abt, $25), Daniel Bell argues that Marxist theory is not of much use in analyzing the condition of contemporary bourgeois society. The class struggle he believes, has been replaced by the jostlings of various ethnic, religious, and nationalist groups. . . . Studs Terkel’s latest foray into oral history is American Dreams: Lost and Found (Pantheon, $14.95), for which he has elicited the reaction of plain people, and others, to the American Dream —a concept which has challenged and baffled many great American minds, from Dr. Hunter S. Thompson to Norman Mailer. . . . Jeremy Bernstein’s Hans Bethe, Prophet of Energy (Basic, $11.95) is both biography and essay—an interesting and timely study of the man who helped father the A-bomb and is today a forceful and iconoclastic proponent of nuclear energy.

Cosima Wagner’s Diaries: 1873-1883, Volume II (Harcourt, $35) is now before the public. Volume I was immensely readable. . . . Susan Sontag’s Under the Sign of Saturn (Farrar, $10.95) is a collection of six New York Review of Books essays on such diverse subjects as fascist aesthetics, Paul Goodman, and the Rumanian “super-intellectual” Elias Canetti. . . . Bernard-Henri Lévy, one of France’s so-called New Philosophers and the author of Barbarism with a Human Face, argues that God is not dead, that He is stirring within us all, and that the Bible is today “the book of resistance.” Lévy seems to be escalating; are the Capuchins ready for this man?

CW

About the Author

Chilton Williamson Jr.

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More September Titles: In The Winding Passage: Essays and Sociological Journeys 1960-1980 (Abt, $25), Daniel Bell argues that Marxist theory is not of much use in analyzing the condition of contemporary bourgeois society. The class struggle he believes, has been replaced by the jostlings of various ethnic, religious, and nationalist groups. . . . Studs Terkel’s latest foray into oral history is American Dreams: Lost and Found (Pantheon, $14.95), for which he has elicited the reaction of plain people, and others, to the American Dream —a concept which has challenged and baffled many great American minds, from Dr. Hunter S. Thompson to Norman Mailer. . . . Jeremy Bernstein’s Hans Bethe, Prophet of Energy (Basic, $11.95) is both biography and essay—an interesting and timely study of the man who helped father the A-bomb and is today a forceful and iconoclastic proponent of nuclear energy.

Cosima Wagner’s Diaries: 1873-1883, Volume II (Harcourt, $35) is now before the public. Volume I was immensely readable. . . . Susan Sontag’s Under the Sign of Saturn (Farrar, $10.95) is a collection of six New York Review of Books essays on such diverse subjects as fascist aesthetics, Paul Goodman, and the Rumanian “super-intellectual” Elias Canetti. . . . Bernard-Henri Lévy, one of France’s so-called New Philosophers and the author of Barbarism with a Human Face, argues that God is not dead, that He is stirring within us all, and that the Bible is today “the book of resistance.” Lévy seems to be escalating; are the Capuchins ready for this man?