Given simply the title of J. M. Coctzee’s most recent novel, Life & Times of Michael K (Viking Press; New York), it is clear that this is an adventure in Kafka land, which literary land developers (novelists, critics, and those taking classes that will qualify them to peddle space) have been clearing, bulldozing, excavating, and building...
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Constructive Criticism — Sometimes
Sidney Hook: Marxism and Beyond; Rowman and Littlefield; Totowa, NJ. Sidney Hook’s latest book is largely a collection of previously printed articles and reviews; but it is nevertheless another interesting contribution to American intellectual life and a worthy companion to such works as Political Power and Personal Freedom. Hook remains an astute observer and an...
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Music – Do, Re, Me, Me, Me
Ned Rorem is a composer. And a Pultizer Prize (1976) winner at that. He is also his own favorite subject: listed among his titles are The Paris Diary of Ned Rorem, with which he started his career as a writer in 1966, and The New York Diary (not A), both of which will soon see fresh...
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Music – First-Timers & Second Stingers
“Movie music!” is the exclamation of recognition that newcomers often make upon first hearing classical music. They seem as delighted with this discovery as was Moliere’s Middle-Class Gentleman when he realized he had been speaking prose all his life. One tries not to wince noticeably when explaining to a neophyte that William Tell rode long...
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Russia’s Bloody Gold
‘Lasciate ogni speranza” -Inferno, by Dante Alighieri The history of gold mining in Russia—a record of the greatest abuses of human rights ever perpetrated—has seldom been told. The use of slave labor in state-owned Russian mines goes back to the 19th century, when Lithuanian, Polish, and Ukrainian patriots who rebelled against Russian occupation were put...
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Solzhenitsyn and Democracy
The name of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn has fallen on hard times. My many public lectures on this author convince me that his sympathetic admirers are legion, but even these admirers are troubled that the press commentary on him seems to be fairly consistently negative. While almost all of his Western critics allow that Solzhenitsyn is a...