Word: mifflin
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Friday Night at Hodges' Cafe, written and illustrated by Tim Egan (Houghton Mifflin; $14.95), is just what a funny book for little kids ought to be: silly. Hodges, an elephant, runs a cafe that would be fairly normal, except that his crazy pet duck causes a lot of trouble. Things get out of control when three tough tigers show up (ignoring the no tigers sign) and decide that roast duck would be just dandy. Hodges whaps the biggest tiger with a squishy souffle, and the duck dives into a large raspberry tart to hide. Alas, his back end sticks...
...Auchincloss wrote about social decay, about the gradual bleeding of moral force and money from the old Protestant families of Manhattan. His Collected Stories (Houghton Mifflin; 465 pages; $24.95) were written from 1949 to the . present, and their themes are remarkably consistent. Again and again, Auchincloss describes pale people who turn their faces, shuddering, from the modern world. His male protagonists are weak and bloodless, his women lumpy and conflicted. As a class, they have even lost their ability to breed. "A virgin to both sexes" is a confessional phrase used more than once, wryly but without regret...
...involves conning kids -- mostly poor black kids -- into believing that they can grow up to play professional basketball. The fine documentary film Hoop Dreams shows how the game is played with high school basketballers in Chicago, and now Darcy Frey's thoughtful, sharply observed book, The Last Shot (Houghton Mifflin; 230 pages; $19.95), spells out its consequences for students at Abraham Lincoln High School in the bleak Coney Island section of Brooklyn...
...Last year David Brock, a writer for the bratty conservative monthly the American Spectator, published The Real Anita Hill, which suggested that Hill was a woman romantically obsessed with Thomas. "Nutty, and a bit slutty," he called her. Now comes Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas (Houghton Mifflin; $24.95), in which Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson, reporters for the Wall Street Journal, offer a picture of Thomas as a man possessed by racial resentments and by good-looking female staffers, whose assets he was not above pointing out to them, loudly and often. In other words, nutty...
...Book Award in 1979) is perhaps the finest imaginative reconstruction of that war; and his story Speaking of Courage (from The Things They Carried, 1990), the most poignant evocation of a Vietnam veteran's displacement upon returning home. In his latest novel, In the Lake of the Woods (Houghton Mifflin; 306 pages; $21.95), O'Brien turns once again to the time-released traumas of Vietnam, writing about them bravely and often brilliantly...