Paperback Originals

Now that the chroniclers and propagandists of the Baby Boom are themselves growing older, we are hearing less about the glories of youth and more about the quiet rewards of longevity as measured by wisdom, experience and the perspective of long years. All of these once-fashionable but long-enduring qualities are celebrated in Gifts of Age: Portraits and Essays of 32 Remarkable Women, with text by Charlotte Painter and exquisite black-and-white photographic portraiture by Pamela Valois (Chronicle Books, One Hallidie Plaza, San Francisco 94102: $14.95). It’s an elegant volume, superbly designed and printed, but the real pleasure is something more subtle and elusive: the revelation of what we can teach youth if we would but listen and watch as Painter and Valois have done.

“Their faces are easy to look at,” writes Painter, “for they hold something that invites reflection. And in their hearts, there is a lightness we might all emulate, and a grace.”

Manning Marable is a historian and political theorist of the black experience in America, an unabashed Marxist, and--significantly--an angry man. “At the heart of Black politics is a series of crimes,” he writes in Black American Politics: From the Washington Marches to Jesse Jackson (Verso/Schocken: $8.95; also available in hardcover, $27.50). “Politics for those in the historical crucible of exploitation and destruction becomes a means of human affirmation and a mode of resistance to the excruciating apparatuses of systemic violence in which people of the African Diaspora find themselves.” His work--which focuses on “case-studies of Black political change,” including the election of Chicago mayor Harold Washington and the presidential primary campaign of Jesse Jackson--is dense, authoritative, full of enlightening allusion, but always passionate. Instead, “Black American Politics” is a work of scholarship with a pervasive undercurrent of ideological tension that flows from Marable’s explicitly radical convictions.

“The next stage in the struggle to uproot racism, gender oppression, and social class inequality,” concludes Marable in “Black American Politics,” “requires that Afro-Americans and other oppressed sectors begin to . . . perceive that the power to transform capitalist society is already in their hands.”

Reconstructionism is the “fourth denomination in American Jewry,” a small but vital and influential movement that has interpreted Judaism according to some distinctly modern notions of God, ritual, ethics and peoplehood. “Reconstructionism,” wrote its founder and chief exponent, Rabbi Mordecai M. Kaplan, “far from being the last word concerning Judaism, religion, ethics, or salvation stresses the importance of saying the first correct word in each instance.” And it is Kaplan’s impressive body of work that is given expression in Dynamic Judaism: The Essential Writings of Mordecai M. Kaplan, edited and introduced by Emanuel S. Goldsmith and Mel Scult (Reconstructionist/Schocken: $12.95; hardcover, $22). The essays, observations, musings and aphorisms collected here embody a religious philosophy of a particularly warm and accessible kind, and “Dynamic Judaism” offers a glimpse of the intellectual and ethical tradition that has almost invisibly suffused Judaism in America. “When Jews said ‘our God and God of our ancestors,’ Kaplan wanted them to mean the universal process of making for world peace, ethical nationhood, and personal fulfillment,” writes Goldsmith. “The God of Israel is ‘nature’s God’--the spirit of freedom, justice, truth, loyalty, and compassion in Jewish history and in all of human civilization.”

NEW AND NOTEWORTHY: The latest volume in Capra Press’ “Back-to-Back” series offers a single volume containing Angel on My Shoulder by Dan Asher and Stories of Misbegotten Love by Herbert Gold (Capra, P.O. Box 2068, Santa Barbara 93120: $7.50), a rich lode of both Angst and lyricism from two San Francisco-based novelists. “Clues About Jews for People Who Aren’t” by Sidney and Betty Jacobs, previously reviewed here, is available by mail order for $11 per copy ($10.45 for out-of-state orders) from Jacobs Ladder Publications, P.O. Box 1484, Culver City 90232.