Best of
American

1972

My Name Is Asher Lev


Chaim Potok - 1972
    Asher Lev is an artist who is compulsively driven to render the world he sees and feels even when it leads him to blasphemy. In this stirring and often visionary novel, Chaim Potok traces Asher’s passage between these two identities, the one consecrated to God, the other subject only to the imagination.Asher Lev grows up in a cloistered Hasidic community in postwar Brooklyn, a world suffused by ritual and revolving around a charismatic Rebbe. But in time his gift threatens to estrange him from that world and the parents he adores. As it follows his struggle, My Name Is Asher Lev becomes a luminous portrait of the artist, by turns heartbreaking and exultant, a modern classic.

Augustus


John Williams - 1972
    Surrounded by men who are jockeying for power–Cicero, Brutus, Cassius, and Mark Antony–young Octavius must work against the powerful Roman political machinations to claim his destiny as first Roman emperor. Sprung from meticulous research and the pen of a true poet, Augustus tells the story of one man’s dream to liberate a corrupt Rome from the fancy of the capriciously crooked and the wildly wealthy.

Black Gangster


Donald Goines - 1972
    He lived the life of the streets and out of that experience he created Prince, the anti-hero of Black Gangster! It's the story of the shocking underworld of black organised crime and the fledgling black "godfather" who goes from teenager ganglord to powerful Detroit mobster. Like the gangsters of the 1920's, he begins with boot-legging and branches out into every known crime

Gorilla, My Love


Toni Cade Bambara - 1972
    A young girl suffers her first betrayal. A widow flirts with an elderly blind man against the wishes of her grown-up children. A neighborhood loan shark teaches o white social worker a lesson in responsibility. And there is more. Sharing the world of Toni Cade Bambara's "straight-up fiction" is a stunning experience.

Mockingbird Wish Me Luck


Charles Bukowski - 1972
    He writes of lechery and pain while finding still being able to find its beauty.

Three Poems


John Ashbery - 1972
    In Three Poems, Ashbery reframes prose poetry as an experience that invites the reader in through an infinite multitude of doorways, and reveals a common language made uncommonly real.

The Fall of America: Poems of These States 1965-1971


Allen Ginsberg - 1972
    . . .

Motorman


David Ohle - 1972
    It is curious that a reprint could be heroic. It is more curious that a book this good could go out of print so quickly. And it is most curious that an introduction would even be required for a novel that, if you examine it carefully in the right kind oflight, might actually be seen to be steaming. MOTORMAN is a central work, pulsing with mythology, created by a craftsman of language who was seemingly channeling the history of narrative when he wrote it. It is a book about the future that comes from the past, and we are caught in its amazing middle. To read MOTORMAN now is to encouter proof that a book can be both emotional and eccentric, smeared with humanity and artistically ambitious, messy with grief and dazzling with spectacle--Ben Marcus, from his introduction.

Log of the S.S. the Mrs. Unguentine


Stanley Crawford - 1972
    So begins the courtship of a certain Unguentine to the woman we know only as Mrs. Unguentine, the chronicler of their sad, fantastical tale. For forty years, they sail the seas together, alone on a giant land-covered barge of their own devising. They tend their gardens, raise a child, invent an artificial forest--all the while steering clear of civilization. Log of the S.S. The Mrs Unguentine is a masterpiece of modern domestic life, a comic novel of closeness and difficulty, miscommunication and stubborn resolve. Rarely has a book so perfectly registered the secret solitude of marriage, how shared loneliness can result in a powerful bond.

The Foxfire Book, Foxfire 2-3


Eliot Wigginton - 1972
    

Winter Trees


Sylvia Plath - 1972
    Her radio play 'Three Women', also included here, was written slightly earlier, in the transitional period between 'The Colossus' and 'Ariel'.

Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer 1943-1954 by Jeffrey Cartwright


Steven Millhauser - 1972
    As a memorial, Edwin's bestfriend, Jeffrey Cartwright, decides that the life of this great American writer must be told. He follows Edwin's development from his preverbal first noises through his love for comic books to the fulfillment of his literary genius in the remarkable novel, Cartoons.

Ringolevio: A Life Played for Keeps


Emmett Grogan - 1972
    While Kesey's Merry Prankster's were off tripping the light fantastic, the Diggers were transforming the Haight from a seedy district of abandoned Victorian houses into an evanescent paradise on earth.For anyone who thinks that those were days only of peace, love and flower power, Ringolevio will be a revelation, as it evokes the gritty urban sensibility that supplied the backbone to the community's free flights of fancy.Vastly entertaining, Ringolevio is at once high adventure, political screed, social history. and hyperbolic memoir. This classic traces the story of Emmett Grogan, a larger-than-life sixties legend of great controversy, from the streets of New York to the heights of the Haight.Citadel Underground's edition of Ringolevio features a new introducing by the actor Peter Coyote, one of Grogan's oldest friends, a fellow Digger and a veteran of the San Francisco Mime Troupe."The San Francisco Diggers combined Dada street theater with the revolutionary politics of free." Slum-alley saints, they lit up the period by spreading the poetry of love and anarchy with broad strokes of artistic genius. Their free store, communications network of instant offset survival poetry, along with an Indian-inspired consciousness, was the original white light of the era. Emmett Grogan was the hippie warrior par excellence. He was also a junkie, amaniac, a gifted actor, a rebel hero, ...and above all a pain in the ass to all his friends. Ringolevio is half-brilliant." -- Abbie Hoffman

Black Women in White America: A Documentary History


Gerda Lerner - 1972
    Here are stories of women who built a school "on a garbage dump"; of the little-known but vitally important networks of women's organizations dedicated to self-help and the struggle for human dignity; of the victims of the Ku Klux Klan, beatings and lynchings. The documents, many of them previously unpublished and long hidden in archives across the country, fill in important chapters in the history of America. "Dr. Lerner gives us material which can change images that whites have had of blacks, and possibly even those which we, as blacks, have of ourselves." -Maya Angelou, 'Life'

Mama, I Love You


William Saroyan - 1972
    While her mother struggles for a big break on Broadway, nine-year-old Frog wishes they were back in California and dreams of playing baseball, until the surprising news comes that a producer wants Frog for his new play.

12, 20 And 5: A Doctor's Year in Vietnam


John A. Parrish - 1972
    

Sincerity and Authenticity


Lionel Trilling - 1972
    In this new book he is concerned with such a mutation: the process by which the arduous enterprise of sincerity, of being true to one's self, came to occupy a place of supreme importance in the moral life--and the further shift which finds that place now usurped by the darker and still more strenuous modern ideal of authenticity. Instances range over the whole of Western literature and thought, from Shakespeare to Hegel to Sartre, from Robespierre to R.D. Laing, suggesting the contradictions and ironies to which the ideals of sincerity and authenticity give rise, most especially in contemporary life. Lucid, and brilliantly framed, its view of cultural history will give Sincerity and Authenticity an important place among the works of this distinguished critic.

Okla Hannali


R.A. Lafferty - 1972
    It’s the tale of Hannali Innominee, a ’Mingo’ or natural lord of the 19th-century Choctaw Indian [and] a capacious, indomitable giant of the ilk of Paul Bunyan....Lafferty tells it straight: how the Choctaw nation, once removed, reconstituted itself and thrived in Indian territory...., how there came a schism between the rich, part-white, slave-owning, moneylending Choctaws and the ’feudal, compassionate, chauvinistic’ full-blooded freeholders like Hannali; and how, during the Civil War, the Indians were manipulated divide-and-conquer fashion in helping destroy each other."–Kirkus Reviews.

Hermetic Definition: Poetry


H.D. - 1972
    D.’s (Hilda Doolittle, 1884-1961) late poems of search and longing represent the mature achievement of a poet who has come increasingly to be recognized as one of the most important of her generation. The title poem and other long pieces in this collection ("Sagesse" and "Winter Love") were written between 1957 and her death four years later, and are heretofore unpublished, except in fragments. We can see now in proper context her fine ear for the free line, and understand why other poets, such as Denise Levertov, Robert Creeley, and Robert Duncan, find so much to admire in H. D.’s work. As in her earlier books, one level of H.D.’s significant poetic statement derives from her intimate knowledge of and identification with classical Greek and arcane cultures; taken together, these elements make up the poet’s own personal myth. Norman Holmes Pearson, H. D’s friend and literary executor, has contributed an illuminating foreword to this impressive collection.H. D.’s (Hilda Doolittle, 1884-1961) late poems of search and longing represent the mature achievement of a poet who has come increasingly to be recognized as one of the most important of her generation. The title poem and other long pieces in this collection ("Sagesse" and "Winter Love") were written between 1957 and her death four years later, and are heretofore unpublished, except in fragments. We can see now in proper context her fine ear for the free line, and understand why other poets, such as Denise Levertov, Robert Creeley, and Robert Duncan, find so much to admire in H. D.’s work. As in her earlier books, one level of H.D.’s significant poetic statement derives from her intimate knowledge of and identification with classical Greek and arcane cultures; taken together, these elements make up the poet’s own personal myth. Norman Holmes Pearson, H. D’s friend and literary executor, has contributed an illuminating foreword to this impressive collection.

Complete Poetry and Selected Prose


Walt Whitman - 1972
    Representative writings of the nineteenth-century American poet and philosopher are supplemented by textual notes.

The Theatre of Tennessee Williams, Volume III: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Orpheus Descending, Suddenly Last Summer


Tennessee Williams - 1972
    Arranged in chronological order, this ongoing series includes the original cast listings and production notes.

The Secret Team: The CIA & its Allies in Control of the United States & the World


L. Fletcher Prouty - 1972
    Fletcher Prouty's CIA expose, was first published in the 1970s, but virtually all copies of the book disappeared upon distribution, purchased en masse by shady "private buyers." Certainly Prouty's amazing allegations--that the U-2 Crisis of 1960 was fixed to sabotage Eisenhower-Khrushchev talks, and that President Kennedy was assassinated to keep the U.S., and its defense budget, in Vietnam--cannot have pleased the CIA. Though suppressed (until now), "The Secret Team" was an important influence for Oliver Stone's Academy Award-winning film "JFK" and countless other works on U.S. government conspiracies, and it raises the same crucial question today that it did on its first appearance: who, in fact, is in control of the United States and the world?

Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art


Leo Steinberg - 1972
    The latter, which Francine du Plessix Gray called “a tour de force of critical method,” is widely regarded as the most eye-opening analysis of the Johns’s work ever written. This edition includes a new preface and a handful of additional illustrations.“The art book of the year, if not of the decade and possibly of the century. . . .The significance of this volume lies not so much in the quality of its insights—although the quality is very high and the insights are important—as in the richness, precision, and elegance of its style. . . . A meeting with the mind of Leo Steinberg is one of the most enlightening experiences that contemporary criticism affords.”

Acres and Pains


S.J. Perelman - 1972
    What you will see is a middle-aged city dweller, as lean and bronzed as a shad's belly (I keep a shad's belly hanging up in the barn for purposes of comparison), gnawing his fingernails and wondering how to abandon a farm.Thus begins Acres and Pains, S.J. Perelman's unique testament to the joys and tribulations of country living. Acres and Pains describes the purchase and transformation of the Perelman property, Rising Gorge, as our hero transforms himself from city lazybones to country squire.Eudora Welty called S.J. Perelman "a National Treasure."

The Negro in the Making of America


Benjamin Arthur Quarles - 1972
    P. Franklin.In The Negro in the Making of America, eminent historian Benjamin Quarles provides one of the most comprehensive and readable accounts ever gathered in one volume of the role that African Americans have played in shaping the destiny of America. Starting with the arrival of the slave ships in the early 1600s and moving through the Colonial period, the Revolutionary and Civil Wars, and into the last half of the twentieth century, Quarles chronicles the sweep of events that have brought blacks and their struggle for social and economic equality to the forefront of American life. Through compelling portraits of central political, historical, and artistic figures such as Nat Turner, Frederick Douglass, Duke Ellington, Malcolm X, and the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., Quarles illuminates the African American contributions that have enriched the cultural heritage of America. This classic history also covers black participation in politics, the rise of a black business class, and the forms of discrimination experienced by blacks in housing, employment, and the media. Quarles's groundbreaking work not only surveys the role of black Americans as they engaged in the dual, simultaneous processes of assimilating into and transforming the culture of their country, but also, in a portrait of the white response to blacks, holds a mirror up to the deeper moral complexion of our nation's history. The restoration of this history holds a redemptive quality—one that can be used, in the author's words, as a "vehicle for present enlightenment, guidance, and enrichment."

Brokenburn: The Journal of Kate Stone, 1861--1868


Kate Stone - 1972
    Kate Stone was twenty when the war began, living with her widowed mother, five brothers, and younger sister at Brokenburn, their plantation home in northeastern Louisiana. When Grant moved against Vicksburg, the family fled before the invading armies, eventually found refuge in Texas, and finally returned to a devastated home.Kate began her journal in May, 1861, and made regular entries up to November, 1865. She included briefer sketches in 1867 and 1868. In chronicling her everyday activities, Kate reveals much about a way of life that is no more: books read, plantation management and crops, maintaining slaves in the antebellum period, the attitude and conduct of slaves during the war, the fate of refugees, and civilian morale. Without pretense and with almost photographic clarity, she portrays the South during its darkest hours.

An Ear in Bartram's Tree: Selected Poems 1957-1967


Jonathan Chamberlain Williams - 1972
    

Bob Dylan: A Biography


Anthony Scaduto - 1972
    Dylan has read this book cover to cover and discusses its uncomfortable contents with the author at length!Though a veritable publishing industry has followed in Scaduto's wake, arguably no-one since has come as close to revealing the true nature of the man behind the shades."Pioneering portrait of this legendarily elusive artist. Now in a welcome reprint, it's a real treat to read this still-classic Bobography."- Q ***** Five Stars!"A classic!"-Paul Williams, author of Bob Dylan: Performing Artist"Pioneers are often written out of history but never let it be forgotten that Scaduto was the man. It's scandalous that this book has been out of print for so many years. Its return should be greeted with dancing in the street."-Jimmy Rogan, from the foreword"The author's triumph was that ultimately he persuaded Dylan to talk."-Liz Thompson, editor of the Dylan Companion"I read it. Some of it is pretty straight, some of it exactly the way it happened… I rather enjoyed it."-Bob Dylan

The Truth About Unicorns


Bonnie Jones Reynolds - 1972
    What dark and secret spell beguiled Oriskany Forks?Why did Crazy Lizzy paint her body with strange symbols? Who stole Cass's newborn baby girl? Why did the round house have a windowless second story -- and no way to reach it? Was the circular pit in the woods a meeting place for a witches' coven?Who would believe there could be so much evil in such a pretty little town?

The New York Times Heritage Cook Book


Jean Hewitt - 1972
    Illustrated hardcover book with dust jacket, 804 pages, published by G. P. Putnam's Sons.

The Cheyenne Indians, Volume 1: History and Society


George Bird Grinnell - 1972
    Volume I looks at the tribe's early history and migrations, customs, domestic life, social organization, hunting, amusements, and government. In a second volume, Grinnell would consider its warmaking and warrior societies, healing practices and responses to European diseases, religious beliefs and rituals, and legends and prophecies surrounding the culture hero Sweet Medicine.

The Sunlight Dialogues


John Gardner - 1972
    Sheriff Fred Clumly is trying desperately to unravel mysteries surrounding a disorderly, nameless drifter called "The Sunlight Man," who has been jailed for painting the word "LOVE" across two lanes of traffic, and who is later suspected of murder. The men battle over morality, freedom and their opposing notions of justice, leading each to find his own state of grace. Their conflict is mirrored in the community of middlebrow politicians and their church-going wives, Native Americans, working-class immigrants, farmers, soldiers, petty thieves, and even centenarian sisters too stubborn to die. Gardner's alchemy is existential: from the most raw, vulnerable, and conflicting characters in the American melting pot, he transmutes common denominators of human isolation and longing. With unnerving suspense, his acute ear for American speech, and permeated by his deep-rooted belief in morality, this expansive, sprawling, and ambitious novel is John Gardner's masterpiece: "A superb literary achievement," noted The Boston Globe.

Bring Me a Unicorn: Diaries and Letters of Anne Morrow Lindbergh, 1922-1928


Anne Morrow Lindbergh - 1972
    Introduction by the Author; Index; photographs. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book

Sand in a Whirlwind: The Paiute Indian War of 1860


Ferol Egan - 1972
    Thirty years after its publication, Ferol Egan's now classic tale continues to enlighten and engage readers.

The Ultimate Solution


Eric Norden - 1972
    The nightmare come-true novel of the last jew in Nazi America!

Drums and Shadows: Survival Studies among the Georgia Coastal Negroes


Georgia Writers' Project - 1972
    In the later years of the depression, members of the Georgia Writers' Project visited and interviewed blacks, many of whose grandparents, smuggled into slavery as late as 1858, had passed on the customs and beliefs of their African past. Seeking evidence of African traditions, the project's workers questioned the blacks about conjure--the curses and potions responsible for turns of luck, illnesses, and even death--about dreams that often determine the course of daily life, and about spirits and other apparitions as real as walking, breathing people.

Good Luck Arizona Man


Rex Benedict - 1972
    'Whoever finds the gold of the Guadalupes must die.'So ran the old Indian saying, but, whatever the danger, Arizona Slim wanted to solve the mystery of his own origins, and if he found the gold too, so much the better.

Papers on the War


Daniel Ellsberg - 1972
    S. intervention in the Viet Nam war. Ellsberg believed that the war needed both to be resisted and understood. His papers helped to define both U. S. policies and strategies.

Love and Other Euphemisms


Norma Klein - 1972
    

Celebrations: The Complete Book of American Holidays


Robert J. Myers - 1972
    Everything you need to know for the holidays of Americans.