ustxtxb_obs_1957_04_09_50_00006-00000_000.pdf

Arm-Chair Book on Latin-America TIGRE-HUNTER BILL BACK FROM WILDS LIBERTY Bill Daniel, the Governor’s brother, came back from South America full of tales of his exciting trip as the Governor’s emissary. He traveled into the jungles of Colombia around the Magdalena River in a helicopter loaned him by an American oil company. He borrowed two home-made rifles from local bandits and shot down a 150-pound chiOn a safari “into the headwaters” of the OrinocO in Venezuela, he shot several fierce “los tigres,” to pass over as undramatic alligators, boa constrictors, pumas, and some wolves. He bought in Colombia, “at a bargain, you can be sure,” a huge ranch. All this, with pictures of two rifle Daniel standing beside his giant dead rodent, suckling a “tigre” cub on a baby milk bottle, and sitting beside the lovely Analida Alfaro, whom he crowned “international coffee queen,” appears in the April 1 issue of the Houston Press, without the refraction at the end one might have ordinarily expected. HARMON TALKS ON HIS WORK AUSTIN Naturopaths use tea s, barks, steam, massage, electrical current, special foods, diet, vitamins, and minerals in their work on a person’s health. They refuse to use drug’s or surgery but they will refer patients who need such treatment to medical doctors. That, in sum, is how Dr. Howard Harmon, the president of the Texas naturopaths whose tape recording trapped Rep. James E. Cox in an Austin hotel room bribe talk, describes the profession he and 350 others in Texas practice. Harmon, in an Observer interview, said his father was a missionary doctor to Indian tribes in Oklahoma. Now, as head of the naturopaths, he accuses the Texas Board of Medical Examinery of using its four investigators to `bird-dog us, watch our offices,” and bring suits against them through state and local prosecutors. He said the naturopaths treat 200,000 people in the state. Many times at the Cox hearings, legislators asked what naturopathy is. Harmon says its secret is that susceptibility to disease often comes from “lowered resistance.” He goes on: “Soils have been depleted year after year. We haven’t put back what we took out. We think that sprays on vegetables have a cumulative effect on the system. Storage of unripened fruits and vegetables to permit transportation prevents their maturing to contain he greatest amount of essential nutrients. Pasteurization of milk destroys certain enzymes and essential nutrients. The removal of the germ of grains the bleaching of the flour renders it pure starchwhat your granddaddy used to make paste to put on wallpaper. The only thing that will eat white flour is a human being. “Because of the use of these things, one out of four people are having to take tranquilizing drugs, and it accounts for more millions of pounds of aspirin produced than even vitamin tablets … The deterioration of civilization, of the human element, results from our own. trespasses on natural living.” The Growth and Culture of Latin America, by Donald E. Worcester and Wendell G. Schaeffer, Oxford University Press, New York, 1956. AUSTIN The writing of a book review is often, though not always, a tedious task. Frequently, if not always, it is also a thankless task. It is tedious because, usually, one reads for personal enlightenment and enjoyment rather than for didactic purposes, and to be didactic about personal things is, somehow, infra dig and tedious. It is thankless because some readers are always dissatisfied with the reviewer’s comments. The author likes the do not. And the other way around. The reviewer is always on the horns of a dilemma: he features of the book while, at the same time, he takes a dim \(or biothors. So it really is a tedious and thankless task. It is also a task unfair to all concernedauthor, reader, and reviewer \(to say nothing of the book publisher, The present review is no exception to this “law.” In fact, this review may illustrate the law so clearly that it may well establish it as an inflexible principle. So with this cynical preface I offer my comments on “The Growth and Culture of Latin America.” THE BOOK implies a uniformity in “growth and culture” that AUSTIN This troubled city has had its fill of villainy of late, but there was one grand exercise in the sport recently witnessed by we who live here that I can heartily recommend to all as a source of much delight: Sir Laurence Olivier’s splendid production of “Richard III.” Aside from an asinine prologue that took an unconscionably long time to inform us that, historically, Shakespeare was rather lax in his chronicle of the last of the Plantagenets, it is a lively thing, beautifully done and full of the kind of vigoror rather, “vigour”that only the Englishor rather, Sir Laurenceseem to have in their celluloid realizations of the Bard. After being wholly at sea with Orson Welles, whose “Othello” and “Macbeth” proved so scuttled that they soon sank beneath the waves, and bored to death with Joe Mankiewicz and his funereal “Julius Caesar,” we bring to Olivier’s “Richard” the same quick spirits and high hearts we take to the sick bed of a suddenly recovered friend. INCIDENTALLY, old acquaint ances are hereby warned that the friend has undergone an amputation or two. This is, as I said, Olivier’s “Richard,” which means that Queen Margaret is gone, that her great scene with Queen Elizabeth and the Duchess of York with its echoing tragic knells has gone into discard. and that Clarence. rather than pleading with his murderers, is allowed to utter little more than a stifled bellow. That means that Gloucester’s initial soliloquy must be padded out with excerpts from his ominous muttering in the third act of “Henry VI, Part III,” just as the first part of the show begins with the coronation of Edward IV from the same play, and is widely at variance with the facts. One could, with equal lack of justification, write about the growth and culture of the English Commonwealth Trinidad, New Zealand, Scotland, Quebec, Hong Kong, etc. It is easy to overreach when dealing with divergent cultures. The fact that Iberians \(whatever that may tled among Indian people \(whatever that World does not warrant lumping their various cultural products into one category, or one book. I have been just as guilty as others in this respect. But, an end has to come to things such as this. Generalizing about Mexicans, Venezuelans, Argentinians, and the rest as Latin Americans is like generalizing about Poles, Hungarians, Danes, Frenchmen, Portuguese, and Greeks as Europeans. That is just too much territory to cover in a credible work. The authors do a fine job of the underlying common backgrounds, and of the individual characteristics of individual areas but they do have to generalize in trying to put the two together. It has been done here with overOnes of the “black legend,” coupled with tinges of the “goodneighbor-policy.” Who are the latinos? Certainly they are not one breed. Juan Bimba and the vaquianos of Venezuela are not the pelados and the muy hombres of Mexico. This book does little to bring out the distinctions symbolized by such differences. So, as a popular work, let us go along; as a reference source, let us beware. that the subsequent speeches of just about everyone else but him are considerably pared. He gets the ghosts, not Richmond, and also the chance to hold forth to his assembled hosts before the battle. In case you wondered, the “versions” of Cibber and Colley are credited in. the foolish prologue, though to me plenty of Shakespeare apeared to be extant, even if slightly ‘awry in the opening scenes. Howervein such pedantries are of somewhat less than burning interest. After all, “Richard” is hardly the wonder :fully ,swift accumulation of purgative horror that is, say, “Macbeth,” just as Richard, himself, by being so determined to be a villain, fails to cause the ache we feel at the fall of such good men gone wrong as Hamlet and Othello. Since Olivier has chosen to make it into a starring vehicle, the question should not be “Why?” but rather “How well has he done it?” The answer is, “Superbly!” From the moment when he comes hunching his way over to the camera to take us into his confidence and cause us to pad obediently about after him through the halls of the palace, we are his. In the full realization that such a thing actually discovered in our midst would undoubtedly be shot on. sight, we neverthelesS settle back into the comparative safety of an aisle seat, occasionally leaning forward to catch a hissed intention and then, relaxing again, prepare for the worst and, secretly, wish him the best of all possible luck. Ah, it’s a meaty part and, as Olivier serves it, hardly kosher, however done to a turn, and however garnished with all sorts of histrionics, a feast. It is a tribute to Olivier as’ producer-director that the style The Glossary is, conveniently, at the beginning of the book. I like that. Whether the definitions are correct is another matter. They may be faithful to the usage in the book; but they are, sometimes, not in keeping with common usage in some places. For instance, “averia” may be a “convoy tax”but it properly refers to “damages.” Also, “colegio” could be a school for first-gradersi not only an “academy, seminary.” The little hings count. There is, on page 18, a sneering reference to Spanish reluctance to labor. Who in hell likes to do objectionable physical labor that he can pass on to some other guy! By the same criterion one could condemn the American housewife who hires a maid or who buys a washing machine! Also, how did the Spaniards spread Western culture from Colorado to Patagonia in less than one hundred yearsby sitting on their bottoms? How did a handful of them under Cortes conquer Tenochtitlan? “Their attitude toward manual labor,” indeed! Even a jackass would pass his load on to someone else, if he were not a jackass! THIS TENDENCY to underwrite the “black legend”even though mildly and, usually, indirectlyis found throughout the book. The authors freqently resort to pat generalizations whose elements of truth serve only to illustrate their basic untruth. For example, a discussion of Scholasticism on. page 73 seems to imply that education throughout all of Latin America was dominated by the norms of the thir behavior seem perfectly natural even in such a hostile medium as the motion picture. By utilizing scenery and costumes that possess the flat, unreal charm of Angelico, he has established a setting that is thus removed from reality into a world where just about anything seems apt, probable, and really quite credible. This approach, being both stylized yet strangely cinematic, generally works quite well, though even when it fails him, as I fear it did in the grand melee of Bosworth Field which is actually something of a mess, Olivier can alleviate the lack by an inspired touch that manages to restore the balance, as witness his final shot of Gloucester writhing in Harris Green his death throes, still deadly, still game. Frankly, I can recommend no finer example of Shakespeare translated into cinematic terms than his handling of Act III, Scene VII, where hebut now I really must indent or I shall go on like this for inches. WHY, as yet I have not praised Sir Ralph Richardson for somehow convincing us that Buckingham could be such a tragic dupe or Pamela Brown for wordlessly imparting a nuance of Carnality into her every muted bit or all the confidants, attendants, and hapless victims for speaking the lines with a good deal more sonority than did the Old Vic troupe on last month’s televised snippet of “Romeo and Juliet.” Surely Claire Bloom did prettily wilt as the Lady Anne! And Sir John Gielgud gave the part of Clarence such a. fragile dignity and his famous dream narrative such a magnificent reading that we wish Olivier had not hewfi his scene with the murderers so. teenth century. This ignores the reforms instituted in education in Spain by the great surge of Humanism. in the 15th and 16th centuries. This surge was spearheaded in New Spain in the early 16th century by such outstanding figures as Vasco de ,Quiroga, Juan de Zumarraga, Pedro de Gante, and Alonso de la Vera Cruz; to mention only a few. Later in that same century, the made their indelible humanistic imprint upon education in the Western Hemisphere. Scholasticism, in parts a highly defensible way of thinking, did not lay the heavy hand of intellectual death and decay on Latin America. In fact, in the Sixteenth Century, there was more progress away from Scholasticism i n Latin America than there was anywhere in Europe. I could cite a variety of “reforms” in higher education that were a radical departure from Scholasticism in such places as the Royal and Pontifical University o f Mexico was thrown out of the window long before the authors of this work imply that it was dominant. I do not want to indulge in invidious comparisons, except for purposes of graphic illustration. Examine this work and apply its norms to an examination of “English” North America, especially the U.S.A. It will then become clearly apparent that this book is an uninspired arm-chair work, not based on an informed identification with the subjectmatter under consideration. GEO. I. SANCHEZ not Shakespeare’s. For this latter commodity, I must refer you to Ben Iden Payne’s production at the University of Texas which, even at this moment, is probably revealing an unsuspected depth in these dark shadows: Mr. Payne has a way of doing this. Olivier, I fear, did not here. ‘Instead, he has offered us the spicery of villainy, in Vista-Vision; the glow of pageantry, in. “colour” by Technicolor; and the flow of a handsome motion picture, all of