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...last week's oral arguments, Julius Chambers, director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, argued against overturning Runyon by stressing that it had become a "significant part of the web of congressional and judicial efforts to rid the country of public and private discrimination." Surprisingly, when Manhattan attorney Roger Kaplan argued to overturn the ruling, conservative Justice Antonin Scalia, who had voted to rehear the case, asked from the bench, "Let's concede that ((Runyon)) is wrong. So what? What's special about this case to require us to go back and change our decision?" When Kaplan...
...understand what the hubbub is about will leave this book little the wiser. Brodkey is obviously talented, but his skills are quirky and obsessive, perhaps more mesmerizing to him than to casual spectators. There is Innocence, for example, which contains what is probably the longest description of oral sex in the history of literature. (This story decidedly did not appear in The New Yorker.) For page after page a Harvard undergraduate named Wiley tries to bring his stubbornly unresponsive girlfriend to orgasm: "The whitish bubbling, the splash of her discontinuous physical response: those waves, ah, that wake rose, curled outward...
Brodkey's central subject is the suffering child. The anguish chiefly arises from the loss, real or imagined, of parents and their protection (Largely an Oral History of My Mother; His Son, in His Arms, in Light, Aloft). Brodkey's family histories tend to stretch out as interminable catalogs of emotion, pain and bereavement alternating with epiphanic flashes of elation: "In my memories of this time of my life, it seems to be summer all the time, even when the ground is white: I suppose it seems like summer because I was never cold." Moments like this almost redeem...
...five books and a Chicago-based radio talk show, the oral historian defines the American experience with collages of interviews. By now Terkel, 76, can be justly charged with employing a formula. Still, it is his formula, sedulously aped but never accurately reproduced. This latest compilation, subtitled Second Thoughts on the American Dream, finds an absence of consensus. "Things can go either way," Terkel observes. "There was a phrase in vogue during World War Two . . . Situation Fluid. It is so now as it was then...
This "retroactive" plague, as Andrew Holleran calls the AIDS epidemic in Ground Zero (Morrow; 228 pages; $16.95), is causing not only panic but a radical change in sensibilities. Phrases like "oral sex" and "anal penetration," once startling to read outside hard-covers, are now routinely bounced off satellites with the weather reports. "Making love," one of the sweetest phrases in the language, now suggests a cause of death. Still, the world is sharply divided into the sick and the well, and AIDS can be something of a lark if you are a robust heterosexual college student at a safe...