Word: books
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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PAIRING OFF, by Julian Moynahan. The book masquerades as a novel but is more like having a nonstop non sequitur Irish storyteller around-which may be more welcome than well-made fiction...
...evolutionary interpretations of human behavior than the articles appearing in your BEHAVIOR section. Yet in the back of the magazine, one finds a reviewer deploring it all, suggesting that Marais speculates too much about the animal origins of the human unconscious (when that is what the book is about), and finally stating that Marais "came to grief over the noninheritance of acquired characteristics," a concept that never enters the work...
...Gleason. Television regards social outrage-even in the euphemistic form of protest, irony, or bitterness-as intolerable betrayal of the public trust. It has profoundly affected us all, even as we move to criticize it, and reduced our spirits to onerous waste. Vietnam, the implicit subject of Arlen's book, has been turned, despite unprecedented "coverage," into a cause (somehow worthy) of America's fetid evangelical toil. The only thing that TV brings to us with immediacy is its own senescent code of ethics...
...principal argument of Arlen's book is that: "Television is not merely a box dispensing such commodities as 'information' or 'entertainment,' but something we are doing to ourselves." You can't simply praise or denounce the dissemination of information. But TV viewers extract their satisfactions in the pains of paranoia, and less dramatically, in an inexplicable feeling of frustration. Television may show us things we have never seen, sounds we have never heard, faces only imagined and opinions hardly imagined, but it makes its offering stillborn, draining off the wonder or outrage. We are made poorer by its dilating cosmopolitanism...
...Perhaps they were about a great, white, ultratechnological superpower picking an out-of-the-way closet of the world in which to have a nervous breakdown- "like sending one's crazy aunt to Pernambuco... but Jesus, now the nervous breakdown seems to be here." His primary concern throughout the book is to present television as a dynamic power capable of fashioning human dreams and fears. He writes...