Word: newts
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Caldron Cookery: An Authentic Guide for Coven Connoisseurs bv Marcello Truzzi, illustrated bv Victoria Chess. I 15 pages. Meredith. $3.95. Having exhausted everything from aardvark fried in yak butter to zabaglione a zingari, the compilers of cookbooks have turned to something really occult. Bats, eye of newt, serpents, felon's hands and less mentionable exotica seem to have formed the staple diet of the industrious witch. It should be said that this book serves no culinary purpose except perhaps to divert conversation among guests from the infamous concoctions some contemporary witch may happen to be serving in the name...
...Kansas of the 1920s, Parks recollects the characters of his childhood as the sort of stereotypes that usually appear in elementary-school brotherhood pageants. Dad (Felix P. Nelson) is slow-witted, humble and loving and Mom (Estelle Evans) is a gentle, worldly-wise philosopher who works as a domestic. Newt (Kyle Johnson) is about as likely an adolescent hero as Andy Hardy, waking Mom up in the middle of the night and listening wide-eyed as she dispenses such homespun homilies as "This town ain't all a good place and it ain't all a bad place...
...dramatist to make such an unquestioning life completely credible to a contemporary audience. To be sure, there is one angry, rebellious black youth who stalks the community giving the sweaty white lawmen a mean time, but he is portrayed as a vicious psychotic who can easily be vanquished by Newt's storybook morality and radiant goodness...
...apparently remains, haunted by totemistic objects. One is the mirror, symbol of self-knowledge, in which Lowell has seen himself as a newt and a turtle. The other is the razor, symbol of the knowledge of life that comes through the contemplation of death. The puritan-lapsed-Catholic may have arrived at the true existentialist position-confronting the possibility of suicide man learns the nature and possibilities of his life...
Anyone who thinks he has read all this before will be right. But no one should therefore write off Gordon Parks's The Learning Tree as just another fictional recollection of an all-American boyhood. For Newt Winger is a Negro. His graduation ceremony is segregated, and the defeated bully (another Negro) is driven to his death by a white cop. His brother-in-law is a dangerous drunk who loads a shotgun whenever he gets loaded himself, and blazes away at the sky shouting "I'm gonna blow the ass off Jesus Christ, the long-legged white...