At Work in the Fields of the...

At Work in the Fields of the Bomb, photographs and text by Robert del Tredici (Harper & Row: $17.95). Film makers and journalists, doctors and physicists often remind us of its destructive potential, liberal politicians carefully emphasize their opposition (in principle at least) to its proliferation. It seems that our age is savvy about the A-bomb. And yet, as Del Tredici points out, our mental pictures of rockets in the atmosphere, the tapered cone and cities turned to ash are so distant that they have become “icons worn smooth by time and use.” Del Tredici’s remedy is not to inundate us with gruesome photos, but to compose a book for nuclear-world-weary eyes. The focus is on the immediate--weapons manufacturing in the United States--rather than on the intangible--past and future wars.

One can espy a touch of scorn in some of the pictures--one blond Goodyear representative displays her company’s contribution to the Pershing 2 Missile System, smiling and gesturing like an automobile salesperson. There is, however, a dearth of sarcasm in this book. Toward the beginning of the text (photographs of factories, scientists and dissidents such as Admiral Hyman Rickover populate the book’s first half), the authors feature an interview with a weapons plant official who seems less-than-anguished about radiation problems. “I’ve seen nuclear explosions in Nevada, and I’ve seen ‘em in the Pacific, and big deal . . . . Sure, it’s an awesome sight, but it didn’t change my life. I’m very blase about the whole thing. There’s no hazard to it that particularly affects me.” And, while one wishes the author had investigated a bit more, finagling interviews with plant workers, for instance, his decision to refrain from lambasting these officials seems wise, for our concern is heightened when we learn the hard facts in later pages: the half-life of highly radioactive uranium, for instance, the time it takes for the element to decay into another, possibly less dangerous form, is 4.46 billion years.

Illuminations: A Bestiary, Rosamond Wolff Purcell and Stephen Jay Gould (Norton: $19.95). Were the pictures in this book not accompanied by a richly informative text, one might expect to find them on the wall of a haunted house. Intent on provoking readers to contemplate the divisions between art and science, humans and animals, life and death, photographer Rosamond Wolff Purcell and paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould take everyday natural history museum exhibits--bugs on poster-board, animal vertebra--and transform them through creative placement, lighting, background, point of view and accompanying text. The consequently bizarre creatures first look surreal, and, then, as our recognition of their kinship with humans and appearance of life after death sets in, disturbingly real. The book principally focuses on how science reflects our culture--Gould finds the museum identification number on a “bumpy-toothed” seal “ordinary and discordant,” while Purcell saw it as “a prison signature with many layers of meaning.” Similarly, the authors look at the white stripes on black zebras and see in our misperception “an interesting commentary on cultural bias.” Gould and Purcell retain a sense of wonder and respect for science, nevertheless. Their intent is not to knock science, but to show the fallacy in the traditional notion that art creates, while science studies what has already been created. Art and science are closer in character than we might think, Gould and Purcell remind us, illuminating the scientific shapes and structures that color our perception of the natural world.

Right Turn: The Decline of the Democrats and the Future of American Politics, Thomas Ferguson and Joel Rogers (Hill & Wang: $8.95). The political climate in America seems to mock the attempts of government professors to understand it--Republicans reign when Democrats are supposed to shine, Americans scorn the Soviet Union and yet ardently oppose arms increases, celebrate competitive capitalism and yet voice deep suspicion of big business. And so it’s difficult to say whether Thomas Ferguson and Joel Rogers are on target in concluding that “in the absence of a major depression, the rightward drift of both political parties is unlikely to be reversed in the near future.” As the authors see it, in the absence of “economic catastrophe” or “a sudden upsurge from below,” advocates of conservative domestic and foreign policy will continue to lead both parties, thwarting fair elections, fuller employment and the rest of the New Deal legacy. Nevertheless, while the authors’ argument is well-reasoned, “Right Turn” was first published in early 1986, before President Reagan’s problems with Irangate, Supreme Court nominees and Cabinet officials prompted many Democrats to toughen their rhetoric against the New Right. Some of the 1988 Democratic presidential candidates, moreover, seem to be standing left of ’86 Democratic congressional candidates, who had echoed conservative themes in order to avoid a failure as grand as that in 1984.

While the authors’ crystal ball may not be in tune with future times, they convincingly refute the revisionists’ claim that the Democrats’ base of strength has been splintered by commitments to special interest groups and eroded by a failure to recognize Americans’ growing conservatism. They call the latter into question by citing abundant nationwide polls that show that Americans actually became more liberal on many issues between 1979 and 1984. Special interests could not have fragmented the Democratic Party, the authors claim, because they did not run the party. Big business, real-estate magnates and military contractors had and have the upper hand, the authors emphasize, spotlighting the scope of the problem by comparing 1982 revenues for national and international unions and associations ($324 million) to those of corporations ($156 billion).

Turn: The Journal of an Artist, Anne Truitt (Penguin: $6.95). The 1982 appearance of Anne Truitt’s “Daybook,” a collection of essays on visual art, femininity and family, and the predecessor to this collection, was noted in few review journals. Their blind eye wasn’t surprising, for there was no shortage of diaries and Truitt had no track record as a writer. What the editors didn’t see (unlike the public, which made “Daybook” a best seller) was that Truitt’s work as a painter and sculptor had given her an unusual sensitivity, imbuing her writing with color and candor. In “Turn,” for example, she gives us a thousand words about her struggle for inner peace, then sums up things with a word picture: “As I stood on a (Washington, D.C.) ferry, bracing myself against the wind and the waves, I realized that balance, not stability, is security.”

It is this sensitivity--Truitt seems collected in mind and connected with nature--that best accounts for the success of “Daybook” and the appeal of “Turn.” For people who feel distanced from the Earth by the pace of the city, “Turn” suggests a way to stay in touch. What’s most refreshing about “Turn” is that Truitt doesn’t flaunt her sensitivity. Like most of us, she wrestles in the dark for solutions to problems large and small. In one chapter, for instance, she resolves not to let death “dragoon me from a drama in which I was playing an interesting part” (“I will simply slip out and take my self with me”) while in another she admits her fear of death: “No word on page, no color set free in space, no act or thought or feeling or hard-wrung conceptualization will matter a whit.” And yet “Turn” retains continuity and character; Truitt’s wavering never seems troubling, for we sense that she always will accept change in life, art or ideas with equanimity.