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2 Roswell (N.M.) Daily Record Friday, November 21, 1980Reading Between the LinesBy CHRISTOPHER LEHMANN-HAUPT© 1980 N. Y. Times News Service HORN OF AFRICA. By Philip Caputo. 486 pages. Holt, Rinehart Winston. $12.95.According to the opening pages of Philip Caputo's “Horn of Africa, something awful happened out there in the desert wastes of Ethiopia, in the fict ional province of Bejaya.What happened was so horrifying that it has Charley Gage, the narrator, muttering dark Conradian phrasesAnd indeed “Horn of Africa doesn’t fulfill the promise of its opening pages. When all is said and undone, the plot is nothing more than a harebrained attempt by three mercenaries in the pay of “The Cratr to arm and train a rebel Ethiopian tribe in exchange for the promise of an American base, should its insurgence prove successful.But say this for “Horn of Africa: Its failure seems an honest one. In his first book — a powerful memoir called “Rumor of War — Caputo tellingly described the guilt and horror he felt when soldiers under his command in Vietnam committed the atrocity of killing innocent people. In “Horn of Africa, he has struggled to explain and universalize that horror.Unfortunately, he hasn’t yet gotten to its source.LYNDON: An Oral Biography. By Merle Miller. 645 pages. G.P. Putnam’s Sons. $17.95.By JOHN LEONARD© 1980 N. Y. Times News ServiceMerle Miller has managed to write the book about Lyndon Johnson that Johnson himself failed to write.The real man, who seemed variously to personify Gargantua, Goliath, Peter the Great or King Lear — all size and energy and cunning, and ultimate disappointment — is more to be found in the pages of “Lyndon” than in his own book, “The Vantage Point.Lyndon has a heart as big as every other part of him, and a mouth to match. He is coarse and ambitious, ribald and weepy, a populist and a womanizer, full of rhetorical wind and obsessed with grubby details.For “Lyndon, author Miller spent five years interviewing hundreds of people. He consulted the living and the dead.Miller doesn’t ask the why and what for of Lyndon’s rages and anomalies. He likes the Lyndon he has found, and his liking of him makes his book agreeable.MARRIEAGES BETWEEN ZONES THREE, FOUR AND FIVE, by Doris Lessing (Alfred A. Knopf, $10)For the second of her “visionary novels. Doris Lessing has turned from the techniques of science fiction to the forms of fantasy.“Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five is the story of the queen of a non-aggressive, artistic, sharing society forced by the gods to marry the king of a militaristic, sexist, poverty-stricken neighbor and give him an heir.The focus is on the changes wrought in both the major characters and their countries by the marriage. The theme is the dangers of stagnation — theneed for interchange of peoples and new ideas even in the most seemingly perfect of worlds. The fantasy format seems to keep Lessing’s penchant for philosophizing under better control than usual and the result is one of her more readable novelsTHE CAMERA. By Ansel Adams (New York Graphic Society. S16.50)Ansel Adams is the guru of American photography. President Carter, gilding the lilies of the old man’s honors, has just awarded him the Medal of Freedom. Now Adams helps us.For years Adams not only has produced probably the finest photographic landscapes in American history but has taught many of the major professional camera persons. One tool of leaching was a series of how to do it books. This book is the start of his re-doing those books with more data and more fresh techniques to mirror the advance of cameras and film.It is for the amateur as well as for the professional. The book stresses the Adams doctrine of the pholographer “seeing the picture even before clicking the shutter. And the book stresses how to give substance to the seeing by proper use of the camera.In the next generation or two. it will be the rare successful photographer who will have been helped by this bookRichard H. Growald (UPI)THE WOUNDED LAND. By Stephen R. Donalson (Del Rey-Ballantine Books, $12.95)Stephen R. Donalson obviously believes one good trilogy deserves another and, with the magnificent “Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever now embedded in their hearts, his army of fans is likely to agree. “The Wounded Land takes epic fantasy’s favorite “pariah back to the land of Lord Foul to start the whole struggle between good and evil anew — and the new one promises, if anything, to be even better than its predecessor. (UPI)LORD VALENTINE’S CASTLE, By Robert Silverberg (Harper Row. $12.50)Silverberg — an awesome magician of science fiction and fantasy — doesn’t just write a story. He weaves it, and with its subtle blending of plot with subplot in which the impossible becomes commonplace and the commonplace, miraculous, “Lord Valentine’s Castle is his finest tapestry to date. The scenario — a young high king, memory effaced by treachery, battling dreams and dark powers to regain his crown — is a blend of Camelot, Middle Earth and “Star Wars. It’s also one of the season’s most glittering flights of fancy. (UPI)
Newspaper Details
Roswell Daily Record
Roswell, New Mexico, US
Fri, Nov 21, 1980
Page 14
Full Page
Clipped by
Bruce T.
ZA 05 May 2017
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