(3 of 4)
EASY RIDER. A hippie voyage of discovery featuring Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper (who also directed) bombing cross-country on their cycles looking for the meaning of it all. The self-pity gets pretty thick at times, but there are some good vignettes of rural America and a supporting performance by Jack Nicholson that is worth the price of admission.
MIDNIGHT COWBOY. A slick package about being lonely and loveless in New York is directed by John Schlesinger in fashion-magazine style, but the acting of Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight gives the film a sense of poignancy and reality.
BOOKS
Best Reading
MY LIFE WITH MARTIN LUTHER KING JR., by Coretta Scott King. Intimate touches and a personal context lend new dimensions and drama to the life of her doomed and dedicated husband.
BIRDS, BEASTS AND RELATIVES, by Gerald Durrell. Zoology begins at home, or at least that's the way it seems to Naturalist Durrell, who recalls his boyhood infatuation with animals and his family's strained tolerance of some of the things that followed him into the house.
DR. BOWDLER'S LEGACY: A HISTORY OF EXPURGATED BOOKS IN ENGLAND AND AMERICA, by Noel Perrin. Examining the literary atrocities of squeamish expurgators, the author has created a brilliant little work of cultural history full of wit and learning.
THE WATERFALL, by Margaret Drabble. The author's finest novel is a superb audit of the profits and losses of love for a woman threatening to destroy herself and those who care for her.
THE EGG OF THE GLAK AND OTHER STORIES, by Harvey Jacobs. Bizarre urban fairy tales delivered with the kick and rhythm of a nightclub comedian.
JESUS REDISCOVERED, by Malcolm Muggeridge. The 66-year-old British cultural curmudgeon writes tellingly of the ways, means and meditations that led to his conversion to Christianity.
FAT CITY, by Leonard Gardner. A brilliant exception to the general rule that boxing fiction seldom graduates beyond the level of caricature.
THE FRENCH: PORTRAIT OF A PEOPLE, by Sanche de Gramont. Only the cuisine comes off unscathed in this entertaining analysis vinaigrette of the French national character.
FLASHMAN: FROM THE FLASHMAN PAPERS 1839-1842, edited and arranged by George MacDonald Fraser. But don't believe it for a minute. Though Flashman has fooled several scholars, it is actually an agreeable fictional takeoff on assorted tales of British derring-do in the days of the Empah.
THE COST OF LIVING LIKE THIS, by James Kennaway. An intense and coldly realistic novel about a man's coming to terms with two women who love him and the cancer that is pinching off his life.
DONA FLOR AND HER TWO HUSBANDS, by Jorge Amado. A sensuous tale of a virtuous lady and her conjugal rites—as vivid and cheerfully bawdy as Boccaccio.
THE BIG LITTLE MAN FROM BROOKLYN, by St. Clair McKelway. The incredible life of Stanley Clifford Weyman, who cracked the upper crust by posing at various times as U.S. Consul General to Algiers, a physician and a French naval officer.
SHAW: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY (1856-1898), selected by Stanley Weintraub. Shaw never wrote one. But this paste-and-scissors portrait fashioned from fragments of the great man's work serves its purpose well enough.