Word: wars
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...idealistic Air Force test pilot. He loves to fly, and he wants to be an astronaut. He is told: "You don't believe they'll actually give you what you want, do you? They'll use you for cannon fodder... They'll put you in a war plane and order you to kill people." Kinsman, already straining his Quaker heritage by joining the military, vows he won't be a pawn of a system he does not like but must deal with to get what he wants--into space...
REGURGITATIVELY, Barth lifts his characters, these war correspondents of the literary battlefield, from each of his past books. The one new creation, Lady Amherst, is also the best. Her sequence of letters to the author describes the progress of her affair with Ambrose Mensch, a dilettante writer late of Lose in the Funhouse. Barth makes a feeble effort to set her up as an allegorical representation of "Belles Lettres," on which her--or Ambrose--hopes to father forth a new novel, but she balks, her past liaisons with famous men of letters notwithstanding...
...interest and sympathy because it's the most coherent and human part of Letters; the other characters dance a contorted jig about it, A. B. Cook III and his descendant A. B. Cook VI send their unborn children endless genealogical accounts of the family's intrigues, centering around the War of 1812. Jerome Bonaparte Bray, part dictator, part human fly, part servant of a computer, plots a Second American Revolution. Todd Andrews--still alive, despite The Floating Opera's denouement--writes to his dead father contemplating a second suicide. And Horner sends letters to himself, listing events that occurred...
...associations in Letters, however, come too thick, and it's a matter of chance which one your brain happens to pick out at any moment. As sheaves of pages pass by, Barth concentrates these associations in several arbitrary subjects: the War of 1812, which somehow prefigures a Second American Revolution; the decline of the profession of letters; the Maryland shore, scene of most of the action; the waning of the Indian tribes; others too numerous to mention. Except for the fleeting pleasure of realizing Barth is up to something, these associations offer the attentive reader nothing but work...
Shaplen takes an incredibly complex and far-reaching subject and molds it into a simple framework. In each of 11 chapters, he outlines the post-World War Two history of an Asian nation. A longtime writer for The New Yorker, Shaplen's chapters are in-depth articles, examining phases of development within the context of the author's experiences. The author knows his story well, though he explains events and people in almost frustrating detail at times...