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Sometimes events are unexpectedly successful. A panel discussion sponsored by the Harvard Book Store upon the release of the Houghton Mifflin American Heritage Dictionary was one such event. The panel, which consisted of Steven Pinker, Wendy Kaminer and Robert Pinsky, provided a very lively discussion about words, their meanings and their usage. In a previous reading, Mark Doty, a slight-looking poet who will finish the season for the Grolier Poetry Shop, transformed himself strikingly by throwing himself into the poem, but without the shouting or posturing that might spring to mind when one thinks of poetry readings...
There are politicians and the usual rent-a-mob in India who want Katherine Frank's Indira: The Life of Indira Nehru Gandhi (Houghton Mifflin; 448 pages) banned. It doesn't matter that most haven't read it. They were told it was a scurrilous and offensive biography written by a foreigner. Now they want to keep it off the shelves because they fear its revelations challenge the reputation and status of Indira Gandhi, Prime Minister of India for 15 years until she was assassinated by her bodyguards in 1984. At stake is the perpetual myth of Indira Gandhi, goddess...
Randall's thwarted publisher, Houghton Mifflin, vigorously disagrees. "We always knew that we were publishing a parody," says executive vice president Wendy Strothman. "Parody is protected. It's something different, because it is meant to ridicule the original. So it's in another class." She cites the naming of characters as part of the parody: "African Americans are often viewed in this country as 'the other,' so to call the analog to Scarlett 'Other' is funny. It's a twist on normal perceptions...
...faults--and it is weakest where it relies most heavily on GWTW--The Wind Done Gone deserves a better fate than suppression. The notion that this slim, intense book will deplete the reservoir of readers being served periodic sequels by the Mitchell estate seems ludicrous. Houghton Mifflin has appealed, and the clash between the rights of property and speech will continue in the courts well beyond the disposition of this case. But readers everywhere should be uneasy when a book, for whatever reasons, is banned...
...answer, provided in James Carroll's fascinating, brave and sometimes infuriating history, Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews (Houghton Mifflin; 616 pages), is St. Augustine. In the year 425, shortly after Christians slaughtered the Jews of Alexandria in the first recorded pogrom, the influential church father cautioned, "Do not slay them." He preferred that the Jews be preserved, close at hand, as unwilling witnesses to Old Testament prophecies regarding Jesus. Augustine's followers elaborated on the idea, writes Carroll: Jews "must be allowed to survive, but never to thrive," so their misery would be "proper punishments for their...