Word: hoaglands
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...Women and Men." Hoagland sets about the uneasy task of trying to assess the changing character of sex roles today. Typically, a Hoagland essay is not an argument but a ramble over the terrain, and this essay's apparent meandering belies its thoughtfulness. Jumping adroitly from a concern that old male heroes may soon lapse from memory to a thankfulness that barriers to equal treatment under the law are falling to a meditation on the wondrous attraction of the sexes. Hoagland appears an artful stone-stepper in the twins streams of technology and women's liberation. He muses. "Technology...
...sets of interlocking parts is unpleasant at best. And the concomitant question of how members of both sense may be increasingly becoming sexual objects instead of people--a development growing ironically out of re-called liberating forces of birth control and sexual freedom--leaves one unsettled. Hoagland deals with both delicately and undogmatically, indeed, with an honest degree of personal uncertainty...
...Ridge-Slope Fox and the Knife Thrower" in both the book's best and most freewheeling essay. In it Hoagland seems more than anything else to meditate simply and carefully on the complexity of life. Again leaping from one topic to the next, he exults in his sightings of animals while wondering if he will catch a glimpse of the fox and then considers what an ordeal solitude actually is, despite its perverse and mostly pseudo-intellectual glamour. Then he considers the differences of life in the city and the country (it is not exactly that life is slow...
...some other efforts. Hoagland falters. "Cairo Observed," written in 1976, shows as clearly as ever its author's keen eye with rich descriptions of men in flowing kaffiyehs, paupers begging and the screaming traffic of Cairo. Yet, Hoagland's political analysis of the Middle East is dated and surprisingly simplistic. The piece ends with the lame advice that Egypt faces a variety of grave situations and "it behooves us to wish her well, as we have not always done...
...last section of the book consists of an assortment of Hoagland's Times editorials. Uniformly great, they are lyrical reminders of the virtues of juneberries, and if not specifically of juneberries, then of the virtue of noticing the smaller prosaic things and events which often go unnoticed. Whether reading about "poisonous and nonpoisonous varieties of the genus Amanita" mushrooms, or the skin in sheddings of garter snakes, one is thrilled. The sobering comes shortly after, when one remembers the criminally foolish president and his similarly foolish and greedy followers who strive to make the water, as and ground unlivable...