Word: books
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...death, which presents hilarity on the one side and melancholia on the other. The confusion has been blamed squarely on the Catholic Church, but a country usually gets the religion that suits it. The Irish attitude to sex goes back a long way. Vivian Mercier, in his indispensable book The Irish Comic Tradition, talks of ubiquitous stone carvings depicting a creature called the Sheela-na-gig, half-whore and half-crone, with enormous sexual parts and withered breasts. This would be the same enchantress of ancient legend who, having seduced her victim, turns successively into scalding water, a beast that...
...defending them against curses, long after the occasion has passed. Anticlericalism is too good and old a sport to abandon entirely, and the most devout indulge in it the most gleefully. The Irish bishops ("the 26 Popes") have drawn their covered wagons up around divorce and the Pill. Book censorship gets feebler all the time, and is now at about the same mean level it was in the U.S. ten years ago. The young clergy are far less tempted by politics than their elders-or by clanking displays of power. "They should put the hierarchy and the politicians...
...women failed to find the key to dominance? The traditional male rationale is that females are physically and intellectually inferior, an argument without much basis in fact. In certain physical characteristics - toler ance of cold and pain, digital dexterity, longevity - women are superior to men.' In a new book, Men in Groups (Random House; $6.95), Sociologist Lionel Tiger of Rutgers University proposes an other explanation for male cultural domination. The survival of society, he argues, depends more crucially on man's affinity for man than on his reproductive affinity for women...
...mild-mannered, happily married man who belongs to no all-male societies himself, Tiger does not provide any tidy answers to some large questions raised by his book. Why have bonds between females, a sociological fact that he acknowledges, been so weak and so much less of a cultural force than male affinity? And in a war-torn world where nonaggressive, peace-loving women outnumber men, why has the female instinct for serenity not determined the political climate? Tiger, who holds that the male instinct for dominance is today as much a menace as a blessing, suggests that...
...narrative moves swiftly. Maintaining an even, detached perspective, Halberstam generates a momentum that carries the reader headlong into the stonewall shock of the book's last sentence. "Then he descended to acknowledge his victory, to talk about the violence and divisiveness, and to let a nation discover in his death what it had never understood or believed about him during his life...