Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, August 21, 1993 TAG: 9310150333
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: B10 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: WILLIAM F. POWERS THE WASHINGTON POST
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
If the McGinniss affair has aroused your curiosity about the actual contents of ``The Last Brother,'' but you are reluctant to lay out the $25 price of admission, you can get a taste here for a mere three bucks.
And if you do, you will notice that Vanity Fair does not exactly embrace the literary leper. In his customary letter to readers, editor Graydon Carter notes, with laughable delicacy, that the book ``has already been called many things, not all of them favorable.''
Carter goes on: ``The excerpt we present here on the tragic events at Chappaquiddick ... is, if nothing else, the most compelling account of a seismic occurrence, a seamless pulling together of the circumstances surrounding one of the most picked-apart and examined 24-hour periods in American political history.'' Translation: Call it fiction, call it plagiarism, but hey, at least it's a good read.
\ Morally and spiritually, we really ought to be more like dogs, but it's hard to know where to begin. What do dogs think and how do they think it?
Elizabeth Marshall Thomas explores these questions in the summer issue of Orion, a philosophical magazine about the ways people interact with nature. In an excerpt from a new book called ``The Hidden Life of Dogs,'' Thomas tells how her dogs secretly tunneled into a hillside on her Virginia property and dug themselves a den, where they seemed to go specifically to spend time away from people.
The author recounts not only her observation of the dogs' behavior after she discovered the den, but her own thoughts as she hung around with them, trying to think and feel as they do.
Orion, a quarterly, is $18 a year. Write to Orion Society, 136 E. 64th St., New York, N.Y. 10131-0249.
\ ``The first hooker I ever got to know well was called ``Frostie,'' is how Richard W. Carlson begins his story in the September issue of The American Spectator. And quite a story it is-armed robbery, booze, journalism, sex and other outstanding facets of human life in early 1960s San Francisco.
Carlson, now president of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, was half of a young journalistic duo hungry for a scoop. Frostie was privy to plans for a robbery, and had reason to want it foiled. She told Carlson and his buddy, and they told the cops. The rest is drama, and should not be spoiled here. It's a true story that reads like an old movie: You imagine everyone smoking cigarettes with panache. The distant, Chandleresque quality of the story is nicely dispelled by a postscript in which we find out what has happened to the players in the intervening years.
\ Friendship is the subject of a package of articles gathered from various publications in the September-October issue of Utne Reader.
All are worth a look, and Phillip Lopate's contribution, an essay titled ``What Are Friends For?,'' is a keeper. The best friendships, he writes, have five qualities: rapport, affection, need, habit and forgiveness. And ultimately, you have to believe your friends are good people: ``The friendships of mine that have lasted longest have been with those whose integrity, or humanity, or strength to bear their troubles I continue to admire. Conversely, when I lost respect for someone, however winning he or she otherwise remained, the friendship petered away almost immediately.''
by CNB