The New York Times Book Review, Sunday 5/26/74 Love comes to Moe Gross Better Occasions By Eliot Wagner Reviewed by Hilton Kramer To that crowded roster of voluble Jewish characters that occupies so large a place in recent American fiction, providing it with some of its most hilarious and poignant moment, may now be added the unlikely figure of Mie Gross, the 57-year old house-painter from the Bronx who is the hero and narrator of Eliot Wagner's "Better Occasions." This is a short novel- barely more than a novella, really - that is at once a comedy and a love story. It even boasts a happy ending. But it is, despite some real belly laughs, a very dour comedy, pervaded by the presence of death. The very title of the book derives from this presence - "We should meet on better occasions" - for rarely have so many funerals and deathbed scenes been gathered into so short a narrative. Moe Gross's romance with the middle-aged widow, Ruth Amin, begins indeed on the brink of death - her attempted suicide from an overdose of sleeping pills, from which she is saved when he arrives on the morning of her 48th birthday to paint her apartment. From that opening scene is which slapstick and wisecracks are combined with a tender regard for common decencies, we are caught up in a rollicking tale, of love as strewn with obstacles and as filled with lyrical wonder as any story of tenn-age romance. We are caught up in a virtuosic use of language on which the Yiddish accented rhythms of the Bronx vernacular speech are compressed into a dazzling operatic idiom. The language is fast, broad and bitter, quick to seize on the worst that life can offer and even quicker to turn it into disabusing caricature and farce. This is how the novel begins: "What? Three flights up with the ladder and dropcloth, and nobody home? Heyyy, what's this one trying to pull with Moe Gross? "I glued my thumb to the doorbell - 'Painter!' - and hammered the door at one ant the same time. So what did I get? The neighbors. In his bathrobe an knock-knees Morning Mouth Krupnick, and Lady Krupnick plus two other pots with curlers and angry faces. "'What goes on here,' from Morning Mouth, ; at seven thirty A.M.?' "I gave him a look. "' You want peace and quiet? Go stick your head in the gas stove.; "Morning Mouth made a move and quick as a flash I pulled the plaster knife, shiny and sharp, out of the overall. "'Shall we dance?'" The other side of this sarcasm is a touching sweetness, and Mr. Wagner exercises a marvelous control over these abrupt shifts of feeling right down to the last and sweetest episode of the story. Gross announces his basic conviction about life to the half-conscious Mrs. Amin at the start: : Dead is a s sucker," and despite all the clowning and melodrama and squalid family scenes that their romance has to endure, it is precisely this sense of life claiming its rights in the face of death that makes this short novel so moving and so wise. Gross is a man almost (but not quite) buried in the disappointments of life, the prisoner of a mean-spirited existence from which the only hope of escape is money, which he never has enough of, or death, which is threatening to overtake him. Naturally, he is unhappily married (:So Madame Poison was home, the esteemed Mrs. Gross?...Would that be the Lady Tightass I've known and loved?"), with two daughters, one a fortune-hunting shark and the other a pushover for her sponging husband. In the near distance are the rich relations whose deaths might bring the bequests that would mean a release from the inevitable downward spiral. It is in this atmosphere of bleak family struggle and vulgar connivance as sordid as anything in Balzac, that Mr. Wagner sets his unusual love story. Moe Gross is an accomplished lecher with a low view of women, and he can scarcely believe that is happening when, for the first time in his life as a man, he finds himself falling in love. He resists it, mistakes it at first for the scenario of cynical appetite he knows only too well, and then accepts it as the miracle it is. It is all a wonderful story, and it is told with a humor that turns out to be a form of moral delicacy. What separates "Better Occasions" from a good deal of the fiction of Jewish life we are used to is the distance from the fantasy of psychoanalytical revenge. In reading this boo,, we do not feel that some private Freudian score is being evened. Some years ago, Mr. Wagner wrote an absorbing family chronicle about life in the Bronx, "Grand Concourse," which was distinguished for its sharp observation of a circumscribed milieu. In "Better Occasions," he has written both a deeper and a more entertaining novel without sacrificing either his detachment or his empathy.

This volume 6 of Morison's series on U.S. Naval operations in the second world war continues the excellent tradition set in the first 5 volumes. While written shortly after the war, the data are still quite good. Extensive research was done on both U.S., German, and Japanese records, as well as interviews and on the spot accounts with many participants, something hard to do today! I've so far only read the first 6 volumes of this 15 volume history, but each one has been well worth it. Extensive battle maps are also a plus. If you enjoy WWII naval history, start collecting these volumes.

if you have a historical interest in san francisco this books is for you.

This book is great! My child loves CatDog and I am always looking for ways to get him to read. This book has made both of us happy.

When Virginia Woolf wrote Roger Fry's biography in 1940, she singled out his monograph on Cézanne as his most successful book, saying that it stood out "like Mont St.Victoire" from his other work. In this case at least, it's hard to disagree with Woolf's judgment. Despite the fact that it was published in 1927, before the artist's work had even been systematically catalogued, 'Cézanne : A Study of His Development' still has a remarkable freshness to its prose, and Fry succeeds in giving the viewer a sense of the excitement he himself felt while looking at the artist's works. ('Critical distance' is an obvious problem for Fry: he had been publicly identified with the artist since including his canvases in the notorious Post-Impressionist exhibitions of 1910-11 and 1912-13.)

Part of the pleasure of reading Fry's book is the way he describes Cézanne's development as if--to borrow another of Woolf's phrases--it were a "double story." In order to explain the radical difference between Cézanne's early works and his mature ones (respectively, before and after his turn to Impressionism), Fry imagines a psychologically troubled artist, who can only find peace by looking outside of himself: that is, away from invented imagery and towards nature. This split, for Fry, corresponds with the difference between the 'Romantic' and the 'Classic' sides of Cézanne's personality; but the schism is never absolute, and even in the artist's maturity, there is always the possibility that the repressed 'Romantic' will return. This, indeed, is how Fry explains Cézanne's continued interest in painting pictures of Bathers and other quasi-erotic subjects.

Such a blend of art criticism and novelistic story-telling makes for a fascinating and provocative read. Certainly that is how D.H. Lawrence seems to have found the book, and his 'An Introduction to These Paintings' is an attempt to wrest Cézanne from the grips of Fry's compelling account.

Clausewitz is notoriously difficult for the novice to master -- some would argue that no one has ever entirely "mastered" Clausewitz. Be that as it may, a legion of frustrated amateur strategists can attest to the difficulty of picking up Clausewitz's "On War" and trying to read it through without a guide. In the "Clausewitz" volume in the Past Masters series, the novice as well as the experienced strategist can gain an introduction to the master's life, experiences, and writings that will make the first reading intelligible and that will serve as a quick review of Clausewitz's main concepts in a format that can easily be read in an evening.

This is a book that should stand next to "On War" in every strategist's library.

This is the very best book as a resource book on the Comstock Lode. It has the advantage of 100 years of history, the ability to amass all of the figures on such things as dividends, tons of material, freight.

It also hs the advantage of knowing what happened to the leading characters of the Comstock.

No student of the Comstock should be without this book.

This is an exceptional book. Kerman mixes just the right amount of scholarship and anecdote to satisfy a reader who prefers either approach. His metaphor of concerto as part of an ongoing musical conversation, not just between orchestra and solo instrument but also from composer to composer and epoch to epoch, lets the reader become part of a tradition known almost exclusively to composers of concerti. By the end of this book, one has certainly cultivated something important with regards to music appreciation of concerti, be they nudge or virtuoso. I even found myself "rooting" for this musical form in the end, hoping that composers today keep the conversation alive--and before this book, I was indifferent to the whole tradition.

Written by a clinical psychologist at the Harvard Medical School (Englar) and a psychologist who writes on the behavioral sciences for the New York Times (Goleman). This remarkably thorough handbook provides advice on many aspects of therapy. It covers how to decide whether you need therapy, how to find the right therapist, what to realistically expect out of therapy, how to get the most out of therapy, and how to tell when therapy isn't working.

A unique strength of the book is its lengthy discussion of various types of pathology and how they are generally treated. For each type of pathology, such as anxiety disorders, eating disorders, schizophrenia, depression, substance abuse, alcoholism, somatoform disorders, and so forth, the authors discuss (1) the signs to look for, (2) variations and complications, (3) what therapists recommend, and (4) what you should know about therapy (for that disorder). The book also includes a chapter on psychiatric drugs and appendixes that list self-help groups, therapist referral sources, and other sources of information on mental health care.

Wonderfully accurate historical account written by one who was there to witness these events. Compassionate!