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Means Of Survival

Book Review

Though Sophie’s Choice handles larger themes — the nature of evil itself, for instance, which Styron examines through the literature of the holocaust — it is really a book about guilt, in particular, the guilt of survivors.

All That Glitters

Book Review

American Gold is a book full of poetry, a book of history, the story of a place as it changes through fifty-eight years, the history of the shaping of a sensibility. It is not quite a novel. But it is a book worth having.

March 1978

An American Dream

Nothing shocks us anymore. The line between social truth and social fiction has been erased (from the Warren Commission to Watergate we have been asked to disbelieve our eyes and ears) and we are in the curious no-man’s-land of the artist, the madman and the saint. There is no consensus reality; there never was.

Different Drummers

Book Review

Brother to a Dragon Fly is first and foremost the story of Joe Campbell, but as the book proceeds, it seems to become a history of the civil rights movement. Will Campbell’s unadorned style is at its most effective when reciting those events both moving and terrifying.

Crimes To Fit The Individual: South African Justice

The destruction of the liberal, moderate left, both black and white, has brought apartheid to its logical conclusion, the polarization of the races. Each color is increasingly influenced by the voice of extremism. South Africa is now poised on the brink of guerilla war.

For Freedom

Write what matters, as well as possible, risking triteness, risking being labeled political, risking being under or overfunded, risking being imprisoned. The only weapon anyone really has against you is death. And that weapon, too, the older poets used to say, can be turned against an enemy.

Dirty For Dirty: The State Vs. Larry Flynt, Or All In The Bloody Eye Of The Beholder

Hustler isn’t sex, but an advertisement for sex. And, like all advertisement, it must be judged, like it or not, as art.

An Interview With David Stewart

I was hoping she might tell us, “Wilmington’s OK, nothing’s going to happen.” But, instead, she made that startling prediction. It was on the 5th of January, 1975, and she said within a year there’s going to be a major earthquake in the Wilmington region.

What Cost Competition?

Economic theory is sometimes cloaked by a mysterious aura, because it represents an abstraction from physical reality. Yet, there is great potential for the application of economics to provide stable material welfare for all humanity.

The Marriage

Summer in College Town. At 7:30 a.m. eating a bagel with cream cheese at Out To Lunch they discuss getting married. At 5:30 p.m. the same day they are in a lawyer’s office in Raleigh writing their marriage contract.