Word: randomness
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...RISE AND FALL OF ADOLF HITLER (by William L. Shirer; Random House; $1.95) is not, as might be supposed, merely an instant, small-package version of Shirer's massive bestseller, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. This book is more sharply and dramatically focused on the man rather than the world he terrorized. Shirer writes with dignity, authority and a total lack of adult condescension. Without blinking the problem of evil, he captures the demonic fascination of Hitler, whose life was essentially the success story of a monster. Like most of the Landmark series, this book...
REMBRANDT, by Gladys Schmitt (657 pp.; Random House; $5.95), is a fictional retelling of the relatively few known facts about Rembrandt van Rijn's life. Novelist Schmitt (David the King, The Gates of Aulis) scraped every document, household inventory, drawing, etching and painting for underlying drama-and added countless tableaux of her own, which unfortunately look more like the sentimental Dante Gabriel Rossetti than Rembrandt...
...random question-and-answer session, Goodman had good words for: work-study programs, such as those engineered at such schools as Bennington and Antioch; progressive education ("We were sunk in the '20's. Everybody got chicken."); the Protestant Ethic ("but with a greater respect for the health of the body"): greater sexual freedom; the Middle Ages ("Why, you know, they had 162 holidays a year then. They know how to live. We don't know anything about the Middle Ages. Those serfs never worked."); freedom of teachers to establish their own curriculum free of administration supervision; moving classrooms into...
From Flaubert, whose bust he used to salute while crossing the Luxembourg Gardens to his Montparnasse flat, Hemingway learned precision, the right word in the right place. But there is an emotional intensity in a random Hemingway sentence that the teachers do not account for and the imitators and parodists never capture. The effect of "In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels" depends on a special quality of vision. Everything in Hemingway is seen as it might...
...FATHER SITS IN THE DARK (521 pp.) -Jerome Weidman-Random House...