...can't stand Lewis Lapham's politics but I LOVE the format of his
magazine, Harper's. Harper's Index is the greatest compilation of
facts and juxtaposed facts you'll find anywhere.
Lapham, an arch liberal, has a son who married Brian Mulroney's
daughter...Mulroney was for 8 years a Conservative Prime Minister of
Canada (of course, a Canadian Conservative is still left of, say,
the Democratic Party of the US).
--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Robert Gimbel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:
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> John, Paul, George and Ringo . . . and Lewis 15 June
2006 By FINLAY MCDONALD
>
> For a young American reporter looking for an overseas assignment
in early 1968, Vietnam would have been a logical destination.
> The war was about to turn worse for the US and, as Lewis Lapham
asks in this extraordinary little memoir: "Where else do journalists
forage for the news if not in the deserts of misfortune?" Instead,
he was despatched by the Saturday Evening Post in New York to
the "mountains of infinite bliss" - the foothills of the Himalayas,
to be precise - to spend time with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the
guru of transcendental meditation, and his newest, very famous
disciples, The Beatles.
> This tiny book - about the size of a CD case and only 110 pages
long - is a reprint of Lapham's newspaper essays on the experience.
> Twenty pages of grainy photographs capture the weirdness of it
all (Beach Boy Mike Love, folky Donovan Leitch and actresses Mia
Farrow and Jane Asher were also present), as everyone apparently
tried hard to look suitably serene.
> An act of vanity or publishing suicide?
> Not at all. As the only reporter to be admitted to the inner
sanctum of the Maharishi's ashram, the author is not only an
eyewitness to oddball history, but also a keen observer of the
Western spiritual hunger that had probably peaked in the previous
year's "Summer of Love" and was now about to crash and burn in the
Tet Offensive, Nixon's murderous foreign policy and the eventual
break-up and disillusionment of the fab four themselves (although
they did get much of The White Album out of their Indian retreat).
> And Lapham can write almost as well as Lennon and McCartney
could compose. A long- serving editor of Harper's Magazine, he is a
wise and gifted social and political commentator, whose talents must
have been obvious to his own editor back in 1968, too. The America
he documents so deftly, and, once inside the compound, the picture
he draws so economically of the pop stars searching for
transcendental enlightenment, combine to wonderful effect.
> Neither sentimental nor cynical, With the Beatles is like a
great pop song: irresistable, uplifting and just the right length.
>
>
>
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