Books Received

149 REVIEWS paragraphs to essays of several pages. They range over a wide variety of matters (e.g., boredom, community, dreams, jealousy, money, property, responsibility) and can be read consecutively or selectively in any order. What they share is a grasping for alternatives to "Usonian" society and its "geo-strangulating realpoUtik ." The entries are, in Merideth's words, the tracing of "the maze of my consciousness in laying off culture in search of nature." Culture and nature, content and process, doing and being, work (responsibilities) imposed by others and by self, duty and desire, explaining and seeing: these are the dialectical pairings which recur, the one deriving from Usonia, the other from its alternative culture. Merideth is after a new language as a basis for a new society. Evoking Benjamin Whorf, R. D. Laing, and Goodman, he recognizes that cultural revolution must begin in and be accompanied by a new vocabulary and syntax. Transforming self, language, and society are stages in the same process. Language and being are inextricably connected; new "languaging" is a "culturecreating act" and, pedagogicaUy, "a high form of doing American Culture Studies." The book is thoughtful and thought-provoking. Few readers wiU agree with aU of it, but Merideth doesn't ask for fuU concurrence, only that we go along with him in sympathy, Usten and react. We bring our own selves "on this voyage together." He invites us to question and counter. The real value of the book is not in what it says of the author's Ufe, but in its potential for making us think about our own Uves. David Fine BOOKS RECEIVED These are books which, for one reason or another, haven't found reviewers. If we aren't able to get to them, we apologize to the authors. They deserve better. Margaret RandaU, We (New York: Smyrna Press, Box 841, Stuyvesant Sta., 10009, 1978). Prose poems. John Berger, Pig Earth (London: Writers and Readers PubUshing Cooperative, 9-19 Rupert St., Wl, 1979). Stories. Teresa de Jesús, De Repente: All ofa Sudden, tr. Maria A. Proser, Arlene ScuUy, James ScuUy (WiUimantic, Conn.: Curbstone Press, 321 Jackson St., 06226, 1979). Poems. Elizabeth Barlett, Address in Time (Chester Springs, Pa., Dufour Editions, 1979). Poems. John Clare, The Midsummer Cushion, ed. Anne Tibbie (Manchester, Eng.: Carcanet Press Ltd., 330-32 Corn Exchange Buildings, M4 3BG, 1978). Poems. John Fekete, The Critical Twilight: Explorations in the Ideology ofAngloAmerican Literary Theory from Eliot to McLuhan (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., 1977). Literary Criticism. Emilio Diaz Valcárcel, Schemes in the Month ofMarch, tr. Nancy A. Sebastian! (New York: Bilingual Press, 1979). Novel. Melvin Rader, Marx's Interpretation ofHistory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979). Bruce Weigl, A Romance (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1979). Poems. Stuart Dybek, Brass Knuckles (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1979). Poems. ...