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INSIDE SOUTH AMERICA by John Gunther. 610 pages. Harper...
Most reporters patrol relatively limited beats-a courthouse, a capitol, a country, a war. John Gunther, 65, covers the earth, ceaselessly crossing borders and oceans as he works at his self-imposed task of describing "the known political world of today continent by continent." The global Gunther shelf lacks only an Inside Australia to be complete. But instead of visiting that continent, as he promised himself to do, Gunther confined his most recent trip to a new study of the ten countries Inside South America. He had been there before, in 1941, for Inside Latin America. But he went back...
...Feet by Five Miles. Gunther makes an entertaining guide. He has a discerning eye for the arresting fact and the improbable statistic that not only sums up a complex situation but rivets the attention of the reader. Along his tour he notes that a farm in Chile, the beanpole country hugging 2,600 miles of the continent's west coast, can measure as little as ten feet in width and five miles in length. Paraguay, a landlocked dictatorship the size of California, has only 450 miles of paved roads, and in Venezuela, which is three times larger than Italy...
...Focus. Such tidbits illuminate a subject; they do not necessarily explain it. In grappling with the riddle of South America, a continent that was colonized half a century before North America and is still trying to catch up with modern times, Tour Guide Gunther sometimes finds the going rough. He often relies on sweeping generalities ("few South Americans have ulcers"), on superlatives (Colombia is "one of the most difficult, complex and contradictory countries in the world"), and there are some oversimplifications that sometimes border on the absurd. "Why is the army so important?" he asks of Brazil. Gunther...
...Visitation, an opera based loosely on Franz Kafka's The Trial, is U.S. Composer Gunther Schuller's way of dealing "with the Kafkaesque in the Negro problem." Judging by the response of the Hamburg audience that saw the first performance last week, Schuller has made a good deal...