Word: daedaluses
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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PERHAPS it is unfair ro review a single issue of the journal Daedalus in a collection of book reviews. A group of essays should not be treated on the same textual level as a novel or a work of non-fiction. But Daedalus, as its authors would have you believe, is no ordinary journal. In his preface to the fall 1976 edition, The Editor explains that the work is arranged thematically and integrated logically so as to provide the unity of a book-length treatise. Maybe it is that prefatory buildup which makes the 12 essays contained in this issue...
...econd half of Daedalus leaves the theme of adulthood and leaps into the future of the U.S. in general and public policy in specific. Overall the writing falls down, but the essays pick up in substance. Few articles could be more topical or crucial to the discussion of present day issues than Glazer's "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity--and Ethnicity." The article serves as a vehicle for Glazer's oft-propounded thesis that liberal policy-makers who insist that differences between races result only from discrimination will eventually polarize the nation at the expense of fraternity. He criticizes those who blast...
What is disheartening about this particular piece is that Glazer does a much better job explaining the same thesis in his longer work Affirmative Discrimination. Daedalus is simply a distillery for Glazer. We get his essence without getting any of the facts to attempt to back his contention. This shortcoming is a function of length; he cannot monopolize the 250 pages or so that he needs to explain and defend his thesis. Barring that, we must settle for an abbreviated historiography of discrimination and the naked conclusions he draws...
...affliction of writing at short lengths on all-too-familiar topics pervades the entire issue. The effect is profoundly negative. It reduces Daedalus to the status of a trade journal for intellectuals in the same fashion that Sporting News, which excerpts routine pieces by the best baseball writers in the country, is a trade journal for baseball nuts. The intrusion of sports similes is usually read as the utmost rebuke, but this analogy should not be taken that way. Both Sporting News and Daedalus can be purveyors of valuable information--although Sporting News is so in a much less pretentious...
...book, Bonaparte, on his way to prison, Finds His Father and Recognizes Him--as every Irish hero since Telemachus and Daedalus has done. O'Coonassa has no trouble; he recognizes his father by his poverty, his fate (he is leaving the prison) and his name-Jams O'Donnell. But The Poor Mouth is as much pretence as plaint. In Gaelic putting on the poor mouth means complaining (according to the dictionary) and feigning suffering to get the advantage in a deal. O'Nolan's humour is as elusive and many-faceted as his name, but The Poor Mouth hides...