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Collected Stories: 1939-1976 provides a chance to isolate and trace one strand of Bowles' remarkable career. The book's 39 tales are not only worth reading on their own, but their assembly should dispel several myths that have grown up around Bowles' work. First, spreading his talent wide has not meant that he spread it thin; any short list of the best contemporary American stories should include two or three from this volume. Second, Bowles' reputation as a pitiless chronicler of the bizarre and sadistic is undeserved; many of his stories are unquestionably grotesque...
...supposedly greatest metropolis has lately begun to sound like one of those boosteristic burgs that Sinclair Lewis used to deride. There was a day when New York City was so smug, haughty and complacent about its firstness that Author Irvin Cobb thought the place possessed "absolutely not a trace of local pride." Yet in the 1970s, the Big Apple, as the city now cutely calls itself, has been larding the air waves so much with a treacly, self-addressed valentine of a song ("I love New Yorrrrrrrrrrk!") that even a tone-deaf statistician might wonder how all the fleeing industries...
...White Album is mellower than Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Didion ranges more widely. A libertarian with a trace of Goldwater in her, an individualistic Westerner, Didion writes witheringly of bureaucrats who would tie up the Santa Monica Freeway (an eccentric passion of the woman in the yellow Corvette) by installing the restrictive "Diamond Lane." Didion, a sometime screenwriter, gives a wonderful insider's analysis of Hollywood as "the last extant stable society." She dismisses the women's movement with some hauteur: "To those of us who remain committed mainly to the ex ploration of moral distinctions and ambiguities...
...according to Loren Eiseley. For decades prior to his death in 1977, the distinguished anthropologist and writer (The Immense Journey) tried to trace the origins of the ideas credited to Darwin. Now, in this collection of posthumously published essays, he reveals his findings. "There will always be an ineluctable mystery concerning the origin of the theory of natural selection, just as there will always be a shadowy web surrounding the real Charles Darwin," writes Eiseley. But as anyone who reads his book will realize, Eiseley has come closer than anyone else to solving that mystery and breaking that...
...heads the U.S. team studying the spill, says that it now reaches over an area 300 miles long and 25 miles wide. Some U.S. marine biologists fear that the spill, pushed by currents, could soon begin to hurt plant and fish life off the Texas coast, though no trace of the slick has yet been found in that area...