TOWARD A RADICAL MIDDLE: Fourteen Pieces of Reporting and Criticism

These are pieces from The New Yorker in which Miss Adler, a formidably grounded and equipped young critic, views the scene: whether the March for Non-Violence from Selma or that of Black Power in Mississippi,. or some assorted enclaves of group therapy (""the hot line to the deep end""), or Los Angeles' Strip, a Main Street for some of the more tousled longhairs (""Man, if you have this hostility, you learn to take it out in loving "" ways. ). The sociopolitical criticism firms up in the last piece where she observes the fractious dissonance of The National New Politics at the Palmer House in Chicago (1967) and where all the factionalism of ""Radicalism in Debacle"" gutters out. There's also some direct report-age from the Six Day War in Israel. With an undeluded eye for the pretentious, Miss Adler, in her assorted reviews in various, areas, mostly books, deflates Genet -- the cult of evil in a benignly permissive society is no longer tenable; some other New Reviewers -- Irving Howe imposing his own position, Podhoretz asserting his own personality, and all of them ""catastrophe dropping""; and along with pieces on Compton-Burnett, Sarraute and Donleavy, there's one on a little theatre manifestation and another on ""The New Sound, Circa 1964."" ..... Miss Adler's reasoning intelligence and zoomar perceptions are every-where manifest.