Word: books
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Very few other topics have held the floor against University events that night. Styron's Nat Turner is one of those rare books which delighted most of the reading public and hit one part of the public--black militants--in a spot so sore that they responded in print. Possibly only individual memoirs have provoked similar reactions, and those from a much smaller group of people. "No novel," Styron says with that heavy calm that makes irony sound imperial instead of petty, "has ever been accorded the extraordinary accolade of having a whole book written about it as soon...
...voice is soft--there's no southern drawl, but there is a hint of Virginia that makes Styron easy to listen to: "Had I had any basic intellectual respects for what was in that book, I would have been seized by agues and palsies and taken a three or four-year trip to Europe...
Marxist Consummation. It can hardly be pleased. In his book, Djilas assails not only the bureaucracy but also the whole theoretical Marxist-Leninist underpinning of the Communist state. Marxism cannot be revised, he declares; it must be discarded altogether. He parts company with those moderate Marxists-including a number of American college students-who are trying to salvage what they can from Marxism after its corruption by Soviet totalitarianism. To Djilas, the two are inseparable. For him, Stalin was not a ruthless aberration but the inevitable consummation of Marxism: theory made practice. The ironclad Marxist system is all but useless...
Unhappily, the authority of great age is accompanied by a certain waywardness and windiness. Along with Toynbee's earlier book, Acquaintances, this one proposes to perform the office of autobiography. Too often it consists of lumbering opinions delivered ex one of the century's best-earned cathedras about everything from religion, war and death to "The Social Price of the New Technology of Farming in Iowa...
...typically modest and practical, studded with such advice as "Don't waste odd pieces of time" and "Write regularly." One point that he might have stressed more is the need for persistence, which his own literary practice dramatically illustrates: in 1913, he began taking notes for a book, Hannibal's Legacy, got around to writing it in 1957, and published...