Word: berger
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Harvard Law Historian Raoul Berger, 72, writes persuasively that the definition was meant to be narrower. Berger is the author of a timely new book, which he hears is being photocopied all over Washington-Impeachment: The Constitutional Problems (Harvard University Press; $14.95). "Maladministration," he found, was proposed by one of the Framers as grounds for impeachment, but was dropped after James Madison complained that "so vague a term will be equivalent to a tenure during the pleasure of the Senate." Instead, the term "high crimes and misdemeanors" was substituted, and Berger shows that its meaning at the time...
...author of a novel as good as Thomas Berger's Little Big Man is not soon forgiven. That marvelous saddlebag full of lies from the Old West was too crankily individualistic for the kind of discreet repetition that is the basis of a successful literary career. Yet anything short of a second Little Big Man is likely to be waved fretfully away by Berger's most devoted admirers...
...writer of this review, a Little Big Man fanatic, has never been able to feel anything more positive than impatience for Berger's interminable Reinhardt trilogy, a thousand-page mope about the flounderings of a fat loser. The impatience is not a bit dispelled by Regiment of Women. Berger's latest book is either a grossly awkward takeoff on the excesses of Women's Lib or a blundering satire about the way men treat women. The fact that a careful observer cannot decide which is one indication of what is wrong with the kind of novel Berger...
...Berger is not simply mocking the humorless posturing of radical Women's Libbers and the increased respectability of homosexuality, is he saying that the domination of either sex by the other is obscene? In that case circa 1973, the subject is not startling enough to serve as underpinning for a satirical novel with intent to shock. As a corollary to the sex reversal, Berger describes extreme cultural and economic dilapidation. Is this merely the author's way of flushing the U.S. a few decades down the drain of the future, or is he questioning the competence of women...
...this fruitless ambiguity is made worse by the realistic tone of the narration, which is totally at odds with the content. George Orwell persuades us easily in Animal Farm that beasts talk, but Berger fails to establish a mood in which it is believable that larger and stronger men cower before swaggering women, and that an entire society has lost all knowledge of normal...