THE YEAR OF THE FRENCHA Novel by...

THE YEAR OF THE FRENCH

A Novel

by Thomas Flanagan (An Owl Book/Henry Holt: $12.95) This extraordinary first novel about the famous, though ill-fated insurrection in western Ireland in 1789 won the National Book Critics Circle award as an outstanding work of American fiction when it was first published in 1979.

This revolt by Irish peasants against their British landlords was unique in that the French, still mobilized from their own revolution, agreed to provide the support of their naval fleet. The three ships that succeeded in landing brought 1,000 men to join the landless peasants and farmers armed with pikes and farm utensils. The newly declared Republic of Connaught lasted only several months; by summer’s end the insurrection was brutally crushed by England’s Lord Cornwallis.

Thomas Flanagan, who spent five years researching and writing the book, presents the episode from the fictional journal entries, memoirs and letters of a number of key players from both sides of the struggle, among them an Irish schoolteacher and poet inducted into the conflict because he can write the Irish rebels’ demands in English, and a Protestant parson who hears a dying Irish soldier’s final confession without understanding a word of English.

In his review, Michael J. Farrell called “The Year of the French” “epic in its size . . . and scope, majestic in structure and orchestration.” TIME WARS

The Primary Conflict

in Human History

by Jeremy Rifkin (Touchstone / Simon & Schuster: $9.95) Modern technology was intended “to free us from the dictates of the clock and provide us with increased leisure,” Jeremy Rifkin writes. “It is ironic that in a culture so committed to saving time we feel increasingly deprived of the very thing we value.”

In this enlightening but chilling appraisal, Rifkin contrasts “the artificial rhythms of our high-speed culture” against “the organic rhythms of nature.”

He explores the secondary consequences of our computer age: the creation of a time frame of nanoseconds--possible to conceive theoretically, but impossible to experience; the reduction of face-to-face interaction; the relegation of the concepts of creativity and free will to the realm of pure illusion. Mark, a student at MIT, told Rifkin: “A creative idea just means that one of the processors made a link between two unassociated things because he thought they were related.”

In the end, Rifkin proposes a reintegration of the rhythms of nature as “the best hope for the future” of our species.

DOROTHY PARKER

What Fresh Hell Is This?

by Marion Meade (Penguin Books: $10.95) Dorothy Parker, author of popular light verse and short stories as well as critical essays and screenplays, made her reputation in the 1920s: Her wit was legendary. A member of the luncheon group that made New York’s Algonquin Round Table famous (with Robert Benchley, Robert Sherwood, Alexander Woolcott, George Kaufman, Heywood Broun and Harold Ross), Parker “smoked and drank in public. She wrote and said exactly what she thought, expressing herself in racy English that caused eyebrows to shoot up.”

Marion Meade reconstructs Parker’s life from interviews with people who knew her and from the few letters that were preserved; no manuscripts or private papers of Parker’s have survived.

The facts of Parker’s life are thoroughly itemized here--the loss of her mother at age 6, her three marriages, twice to the same man (Alan Campbell), her years in Hollywood with S. J. Perelman, William Faulkner and Lillian Hellman, her affairs, suicide attempts and her alcoholism--and some effort has been taken to bring a deeper level of understanding. Meade writes: “Underneath lay concealed another fiction, never articulated but internalized so completely that it became an implant in her deepest self--an unloved orphan, which was how she experienced herself, must be clever and amusing in order to ensure survival.”

THE PERFECT FAILURE

Kennedy, Eisenhower, and the CIA at the Bay of Pigs

by Trumbull Higgins (W.W. Norton: $7.95) The Bay of Pigs invasion was the most memorable U.S. covert-operation-as-military-fiasco until very recent times.

The CIA’s plan to train and launch a counterrevolutionary guerrilla force of Cuban exiles to overthrow Fidel Castro was conceived under the Eisenhower Administration and only inherited by the inexperienced, newly elected President Kennedy. The operation was “a sort of orphan child J.F.K. had adopted,” Allen Dulles later admitted in his private papers; “he had no real love and affection for it (and) proceeded uncertainly towards defeat.”

Drawing from memoirs and transcripts, documents newly available under the Freedom of Information Act as well as from interviews with many of the principals, Trumbull Higgins vividly re-creates the infamous debacle. A compelling indictment of covert operations gone awry and a book well worth reading.