BOOK REVIEWS

Sheila Niles 30-B-2 FPE

(Just a line of apology for missing the last two issues. It was not that I was "turned off', but that my brother got so turned ON that he made more promises than both of us could keep. It wasn't a real great year for books anyhow; see the bad news below. Some of it will boil the gel in your inserts!)

I'M GLAD I'M A BOY! I'M GLAD I'M A GIRL!, by Whitney Darrow, Simon and Schuster, New York, $2.95 (1970).

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Now that is a lovely title, and I'll hope to find time to write a book to go behind it - but this one is the pre- cise opposite of what I would say! Because I DO love being both, and wouldn't give up either for all the gold in Fort Knox; but what this FINK

Darrow has produced is a weapon to hammer into the little heads of the next generation that boys and girls have absolutely NOTHING in common. The Women's Lib isn't going to like it either, for the same reason plus the fact that Darrow always manages to put the girls in second place, socially and occupationally. As Charlotte Blount put it in the famous words of the Supreme Court, it is “devoid of redeeming social significance", without even the advantage of being pornographic. The deadly message is blandly driven home on every page, with a line of text and an illustration of each doing their contrasting things: "Boys have trucks. Girls have dolls... Boys are strong. Girls are grace- ful . . . Boys fix things. Girls need things fixed . . .” Get the message? GET the message? GET THE MESSAGE?

THE MALE IN CRISIS, by Karl Bernardik, transl. by Helen Sebba, Knopf, New York, 188 pp., $5.95 (1970)

This is another baddy, done by a Viennese in the Germanic style of 'totalthink. He is desperately concerned over the decreasing masculinity

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