Word: books
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Urban killing is as old as cities; today, the accounts of street crime have grown so familiar that death has lost its sting. In a book that should prove this year's Helter Skelter, Crime Writer Clark Howard restores to this now routine event a primal horror. His pounding narrative meticulously describes the so-called Zebra killings of 1973-74, when 23 white San Franciscans were murdered or maimed by a group of Black Muslim extremists. In the retelling, the cold jargon of police files leaps starkly to life...
Howard is clearly unhappy with that possibility. For the true villain of his book is a criminal-justice system that fails to protect society from its marauders. There is, however, another villain in Zebra - one that Howard somewhat slights. In concentrating on the crimes, hideous as they are, he does not really grapple with the social ecology that may drive ill-educated, rootless men to acts of such brutality. Still, Howard's pronouncement echoes like a scream on a dark street: "California [has] a bad habit of letting its convicted killers out to kill again...
...ginger vanished from J.P. Donleavy's comedy about the time he got himself an Irish country squire's suit to wear for dust-jacket photographs several books ago. The ratty, malicious humor of The Ginger Man (1965) was unmistakably the effort of an authentic writer. Donleavy's recent works seem to be the chores of an author, necessary productions for the furtherance of a literary personage. Donleavy may not actually have dictated his new book while riding in the back of a rented Rolls, but the impression given by Schultz, a farce about an American theatrical impresario...
...Green. Their firm is called Sperm Productions, and the show that he is trying to produce is called Kiss It, Don't Hold It, It's Too Hot. The funny names suggest that we are in P.G. Wodehouse country. So does the buckety-buckety pace of the book, as Schultz careers from misfortune to disaster in his efforts to produce what is evidently going to be his fourth straight flop...
...sign of that determination is China's present love affair with science. It is the leading subject in schools; under Chairman Hua Guofeng's "six ones program" schoolchildren read at least one science book, tell one science story, do one experiment, explain one natural phenomenon and prophesy one scientific advance. Scientific goals and triumphs are heralded on wall posters, and popular science magazines are flourishing, extolling every contemporary marvel...