Word: myths
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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MEDEA (London: 3 LPs). Despite its powerful theme-the myth of the murdering mother-this 'opera has been infrequently performed since its composition 171 years ago. One reason is Cherubini's static, pedantic score. Another is the sadistic vocal demands of Medea, the lead role. In this album Gwyneth Jones lamentably fails to match her magnificent voice to the emotional exigencies of Medea, and Lamberto Gardelli's conducting is scandalously lethargic. The Callas version of Medea, released by Mercury in 1958, is an infinitely better listener's choice...
Critical judgment is the basis of all good reporting. In Robert F. Kennedy: The Myth and the Man (Trident Press, $6.95), Victor Lasky is simply critical. His singleminded judgment is that ev erything Robert Kennedy ever did was ill-motivated or wrong - usually both. To back that up, he has compiled 407 pages of quotations and anecdotes, mostly from newspapers, magazines, books and anonymous journalists and politicians. For example, as evidence that Kennedy was not far enough left on an issue, he quotes Ramparts. To bear wit ness that Kennedy was not far enough right, he cites William Buckley...
Lasky lashed the Kennedys in a 1963 newsbook called JFK: The Man and the Myth. Published shortly before the assassination, it exhibited the same unblinking reliance on unfriendly quotes as RFK. The question arises: Who is Lasky, and why does he seem to spend his life attacking Kennedys in print...
...trouble with the American lib eral middle class, Abbie complains, is that-among other things-it lives the myth of Abraham and Isaac backward: " 'God is dead,' they cry, 'and we did it for the kids.' " (Abraham, of course, was prepared to kill his own son for God.) On student revolt, he comments: "And so you ask, 'What about the innocent bystanders?' But we are in a time of revolution. If you are a bystander, you are not innocent." He is particularly ferocious toward the press: "The headline of the Daily News today reads...
Newton, probably the most important of all scientists, is surely nine-tenths myth. Absent-minded, able to concentrate exclusively on his work for long hours during his fertile period, and generally refusing to pay any attention to getting his work published. Newton is the type of the Scientific Genius. But there is a more sordid, or at least more human, side to Newton's life. After quarreling with one astronomer (John Flamsteed) he removed from the second edition of the Principia all passages from the first edition in which he had acknowledged his debt to the man. In a paper...