Word: books
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...radiating a nostalgia not for what was but for what could be. Since this mystic longing has increasingly filled the novels and stories of Author Doris Lessing, 59, it is not surprising that she has finally got around to spaceships and galactic travelers; she herself calls Shikasta, her 24th book, "space fiction." This description is accurate enough, but it may mislead some into expecting much less than this dazzling novel actually delivers. Shikasta owes more to Gulliver's Travels and the Old Testament than to Buck Rogers; it is at once a brief history of the world, a tract...
...that may seem too much for a 384-page book to accomplish, but Lessing's premise gives her aeons of time to fill. Scouts from the benign galactic empire Canopus discover a small but promising planet, obviously the young earth, whose denizens include a strain of monkeys beginning to stand on their own two feet. The Canopeans introduce a race of superior creatures to tutor these humanoids and help speed their evolution. Eventually, the planet, called Rohanda, is deemed ready to be locked into the vast, overarching harmony that prevails throughout the domain of Canopus...
Thus passages that infuriate can be endured in the knowledge that enchantment is on the way. The book's allegory points insistently to earth, and the history of Shikasta as seen from Canopus is often, by earthly standards, particularly hamhanded: "For a couple of centuries at least, then, a dominant feature of the Shikastan scene was that a particularly arrogant and self-satisfied breed, a minority of the minority white race, dominated most of Shikasta, a multitude of different races, cultures, and religions which, on the whole, were superior to that of the oppressors." Such polemics alternate with passages...
...skeptic who contemplates Mailer's labors in orchestrating all these interviews is tempted to think that he deserves the Nobel Prize for Typing. But Mailer does not work stupidly; the flat, banal voices mustered here soon become haunting. The book is like an immense issue of the National Enquirer being endlessly explicated until it is forced to yield some truth. Gilmore's story is a sort of immense white-trash saga; he accomplishes his victory even in death by calling down all kinds of electronic gods to attend: photographers, wire services, television networks, and at last even...
...Mexico, Europe, North Africa and Brazil, her home for 18 years. Precise observations of her adopted lands, reflected in a personal but distanced eye, figured large in her lean, immaculately wrought poetry. Though revered by fellow writers, Bishop was not widely known: her Complete Poems, which won a National Book Award in 1970, comprises a single, 200-page volume...