October 1967
In This Issue
Explore the October 1967 print edition below. Or to discover more writing from the pages of The Atlantic, browse the full archive.
Articles
Where Ghetto Schools Fail
In this second of a two-part series on ghetto schools, the author, a thirty-year-old Harvard graduate and novelist, describes the sequence of events that led to his dismissal from one of Boston’s Roxbury schools—for bringing into his classroom reading materials he felt bridged the gap between the ghetto environment of his pupils and the prejudices and irrelevancies of their antiquated textbooks.
Maybe God Will Come and Clean Up This Mess
How do ghetto Negroes look at the white world outside their decaying neighborhoods? And how do they explain or respond to the spontaneous violence and destructiveness of slum rioting? A partial answer comes from Dr. Robert Coles.
Dynamite
The tragedy of our exploding ghettos has historical roots in the false expectations of the Reconstruction era, and in the refusal of American citizens to sense the frustration and violence gathering in the slums.
What I Need Don't Come in Suitcases
“Everybody who lives on an island is a little bit crazy. That’s why Manhattan was so much fun before everybody commuted to the mainland.”This is only one of the ample reflections of the man in the story who steps into an aluminum phone booth on another, smaller island and winds up talking to nowhere. Ralph Maloney’s entertaining novel about the rum-running days, THE GREAT BONACKER WHISKEY WAR (Atlantic-Little. Brown), is now at the bookstores.
The Difficulties of Being Major: The Poetry of Robert Lowell and James Dickey
by Peter Davison As time takes its toll of those who brought American poetry into flower after World War I, who are the likely successors to Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens. William Carlos Williams, and Theodore Roethke? Mr. Davison, whose latest book of poems, THE CITY AND THE ISLAND, was published by Atheneum last year, nominates Robert Lowell and James Dickey for the honor.
Where Praise Is Due
Don't Fish While I'm Talking
The ATLANTIC’S editor says that he indulges here in even less than the accepted minimum of exaggeration.
A Knee by Any Other Name
A graduate of Columbia University’s graduate school of journalism, Sylvia Auerbach lives in New York City and is an editor for a publishing house.
Montessori Suey
R. G. G. Price tires in Sussex and is a regular contributor to PUNCH as well as the ATLANTIC.
Stop the Dirty-Word Drain
Traveling With Children
Redaction
Tapes Hit the Road
The Peripatetic Reviewer
Reader's Choice
Potpourri
India's Holy Men
Gary, Indiana
Middle East: After the Arab Defeat
Dragon Under Glass: Time for a New China Policy
A China-watcher since he grew up there as the son of missionaries and attended the University of Nanking, Mr. Thomson sees signs of a new approach in our relations with Communist China. THE UNITED STATES AND CHIN A IN WORLD AFFAIRS, a series of studies undertaken by the Council on Foreign Relations, provides the basis, he says, for a mature Far Eastern policy. Mr. Thomson, who now teaches history at Harvard, writes out a background of experience in the White House and the Department of State during the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations.
Washington
George Orwell
Anthony Powell is celebrated for the lifelike characters he has been creating in his MUSIC OF TIME novels, and his close friend George Orwell is now recalled for us with equal vividness. As paradoxical a personality as might be found in fiction or reality, Orwell was a confirmed adherent of the left wing who had a strong taste for things Victorian, who fought against Franco in the Spanish Civil War but became world famous and was denounced by the Communists for his great polemics against the totalitarian state, ANIMAL FARM and 1984.
Lady Poet
Picasso as Sculptor
One of the greatest art excitements of the age is in store for visitors to New York’s Museum of Modern Art from October ll through January I when the sculpture of Pablo Picasso will be on display. Nearly 300 works, many of them long kept from view in the artist’s private collection, demonstrate that Picasso ‘s genius in painting is equaled in his work with plaster, bronze, sheet metal, and whatever material fell into the grasp of his supple hands and towering imagination. The ATLANTIC here presents a preview of the sculpture of art’s protean man of the century, who becomes eighty-six years old this month. The appreciation of Picasso as sculptor by Sir Roland Penrose, the noted critic and friend of the artist, is drawn from his introduction to THE SCULPTURE OF PICASSO, a book to be published by the Museum of Modern Art in connection with the exhibit.
"They" Never Sleep
The racetrack in spring is a place of optimism, of dreams of zooming stocks, flashy cars and clothes and women, but fall at the track is the season of “gel even” time, when the Irvings and the Arnolds of the betting world are especially wary of the mysterious powers that flex the fickle finger of fate. Sam Toperoff, a toft who writes poems yet, and author of ALL THE ADVANTAGES (Atlantic-Little, Brown) and of a forthcoming book on the lore, the sociology, and the delights of horse racing, takes you to the head of the stretch on a typical brisk autumn day at The Big A. Dress warmly and listen carefully to the conversation around you.
Paintings by Van Gogh
Arms and the Man Who Sells Them
In the old days, the “merchants of death ” sold arms for profit, and let the bullets fall where they might. Today, the U.S. government sells them for policy reasons (and profit), and argues Senator McCarthy (Democrat, Minnesota), the results are no less disastrous. A member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and one of the earliest critics of the Pentagon’s controversial arms sales program, McCarthy is the author of the forthcoming THE LIMITS OF POWER (Holt, Rinehart and Winston), from which this article is adapted.
Mirage
“ It was a mirage morning when the distance swells up and is more clear than what is close” But this story reveals the author’s clear knowledge of her native North Dakota as well as the larger view of human life. Miss O’ Donnell has spent the last two years as a graduate student in the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa, where she studied under Kurt Vonnegul.
Brother Jordan's Fox
Black Ghettos: The American Nightmare
