In these two recent spy thrillers, William F. Buckley’s CIA-trained alter ego makes his sixth and seventh appearances in a decade to play a winning hand in the high-stakes intrigue surrounding crucial moments in the Cold War. On a secret mission to Cuba (Project Alligator) aimed at exploring with Che Guevara possibilities for easing tensions...
Author: Robert F. Geary (Robert F. Geary)
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Boredom, Sex, and Murder
” . . . knew every quirk within lust’s labyrinth and were professed critic in lechery.” —Ben Jonson Cracks are appearing in the idol of high culture fabricated by the Victorians. Matthew Arnold eloquently expressed the vision of the educated person who joins moral commitment with breadth of vision and transcends the narrowness of religion...
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Paranoia as Prudence
‘Believing where we cannot prove.” -Tennyson Edith Efron: The Apocalyptics: Cancer and the Big Lie: How Environmental Politics Controls What We Know About Cancer; Simon & Schuster; New York. “Edith Efron would like to shake the cancer-fighting agencies to their foundations with this book, and perhaps she will.” The New Republic. ...
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Trivial Spirits
Malcolm Bradbury: Rates of Exchange; Alfred A. Knopf; New York Vassily Aksyonov: The Island of Crimea; Translated by Michael Henry Heim; Random House; New York. Signs of massive political fatuity abound. In the face of more than a decade of relentless Soviet arms acquisition, righteous notables in the West chant for a (virtually unilateral) freeze...
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Horrors in the Age of Disbelief
Stephen King: Pet Sematary; Doubleday; New York. If it is true that popular literature, in however unexamined a fashion, embodies many of the presuppositions of an age, then the last decade and a half’s spate of supernatural shockers raises some intriguing questions. According to the higher wisdom of the academy, for instance, the creature known as...
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Beyond the Public View
Tadeusz Konwicki: A Minor Apocalypse; Translated by Richard Lourie; Farrar, Straus & Giroux; New York. Contemporary Poland, for many reasons, disquiets the West. To those who nurture visions of a painless and peaceful accord between the Soviets and the United States against the supposed “common enemy” of nuclear weapons, the squashing of Solidarity to placate...