Word: vanzettis
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...movies depicting Japanese as bloodthirsty primitives. But for the diarist, now 81 and living in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, the fact that Japanese and Americans were getting along at the camp was perfectly normal. A flinty, no-nonsense New Englander who once worked in the campaign to free Sacco and Vanzetti, Crouter viewed World War II as a tiresome family quarrel, and not a fit activity for respectable adults. Her book (Forbidden Diary, $14.95, to be published next month by Burt Franklin & Co.) is remarkable for the interplay it creates between that view and the delicate Japanese-American minuet...
Writing in the first person, Starbuck tells us a story that is a pitifully amusing parody of the John Dean-H.R. Haldeman "Let's Make Money Off of Watergate" autobiographies. And somehow, Vonnegut manages to work in some particularly cogent statements about the mistreatment of Sacco and Vanzetti and the history and problems of the twentieth-century labor movement in general...
...trials are still thundering forth in such books as Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case by Allen Weinstein (against Hiss) and We Are Your Sons by Robert and Michael Meeropol (for the Rosenbergs, who were indeed the Meeropols' parents). There is always the hope of posthumous vindication: Sacco and Vanzetti were executed in 1927, but only two years ago, Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis proclaimed that because of prejudice in their trial no stigma should attach to their memory...
This plot is loose and baggy enough to give Vonnegut plenty of leg room, and he strolls about at will. He offers a lengthy account, for instance, of the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti and of their subsequent executions in the 1920s. Not all of the digressions are somber. Starbuck meets Nixon and finds the President's smile "like a rosebud that had just been smashed by a hammer." The hero's meditations on money are childlike enough to produce odd insights. On his first morning of freedom, Starbuck leaves his seedy hotel to buy a newspaper...
...quite so far up Mass Ave is Sacco and Vanzetti's hangout-Emack and Bolio's. This store has excellent ice cream by the standards of even a Harvard ice cream connoisseur-and it's cheaper than Steve...