Word: books
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Freud always considered himself a "bold oppositionist," at his best warding off attackers. Around this notion, says Sulloway, grew the myth that Freud was beset on all sides for his shocking new ideas. In truth, much of the medical Establishment was on the same track as Freud, and his books were generally well received. In his three-volume biography, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, Ernest Jones insists that The Interpretation of Dreams "had been hailed as fantastic and ridiculous." Comments Sulloway: "Actually the book was widely and favorably reviewed in popular and scientific periodicals and it was recognized...
Imagine a Harvard grad ('35) and Washington bureaucrat named Walter Starbuck so scandalously long playing that he gets involved first in Hiss-Chambers and then three decades later in Watergate. Novelist Kurt Vonnegut did, turning the tale into Jailbird, his first book in three years, which will be published this fall. His next book may well take longer to write since Vonnegut, summering on Long Island, has taken to canoeing just as he did as a boy on an Indiana lake. "It is especially pleasant," he explains, resting on his literary oar, "not to paddle...
...book's few revelations concerns the extent of her involvement with the Soviet secret police. Her husband had been an early employee of the Cheka, and she pursued the association by welcoming agents to gatherings at the apartment the Briks shared with Mayakovsky. One of the lovers Lili took when Mayakovsky was still alive was a high-level secret police official. But the most shocking anecdote is provided by Rita Rait, now one of Russia's most distinguished translators from English. In the '20s, Lili sought to recruit Rait to spy on Russian emigres in Berlin...
...such informers, as Mandelstam and hundreds of other writers did during the Great Purges of the late '30s. But who could be held accountable for his actions? asked Nadezhda Mandelstam. Her answer may apply to all the characters in the pitiful drama that is played out in this book. A person's be havior, and even character, she wrote, "is always in the merciless grip of the age, which squeezes out of him the drop of good or evil that it needs from him." -Patricia Blake
...this collection of posthumously published essays, he reveals his findings. "There will always be an ineluctable mystery concerning the origin of the theory of natural selection, just as there will always be a shadowy web surrounding the real Charles Darwin," writes Eiseley. But as anyone who reads his book will realize, Eiseley has come closer than anyone else to solving that mystery and breaking that web. In graceful, occasionally poetic prose, he shows how Darwin, who was initially timid about advancing his theory, was almost beaten into print by Alfred Russel Wallace, a younger, all but unknown researcher. After discussion...