The South African Disease: Apartheid Health and...

The South African Disease: Apartheid Health and Health Services, Cedric de Beer (Africa World Press, P.O. Box 1892, Trenton, N.J.: $7.95). The notion of a segregated Western nation in the 1980s has so amazed American writers that many are still registering moral outrage and trading impressionistic thoughts about separate facilities rather than reporting on apartheid’s day-to-day dangers. This lapse has made it easier for Afrikaner leaders to perpetuate the myth that health and human services in South Africa are “separate but equal.” Cedric de Beer’s slim book is thus valuable and unusual, for while dryly written and weighted down with statistics, it shows that “the realities of apartheid are not to be found in segregated parks and separate lavatories, but in infant mortality rates, cholera epidemics and TB statistics.” Only 1% of TB victims in South Africa are white, for instance, even though TB most likely came to southern and central Africa with white colonizers. Most of the solutions suggested by the author, a rural health worker in South Africa, might be politically possible--the development of adequate housing and such services as sanitation and water supply--but some ideas suggest a need for more radical change: “The working class earns wages which are either on the borderline or below the level of living standards required to maintain good health.”

Why Nothing Works, Marvin Harris (Simon & Schuster: $7.95). The author’s thesis must have made sense when this book first appeared in 1981. Discouraged after a failed attempt to rescue the hostages in Iran, jaded about a recession and a recent wave of automobile recalls, it’s conceivable that we too would have concluded, as Marvin Harris did in these pages, that the federal debt, crime, cults, sex shops and run-down gas stations were all part of a peculiarly American malaise. But Harris’ new preface fails to help by linking these disparate phenomena in any systematic way to today’s official mood of “morning in America.” Harris, an anthropology professor, has the best of intentions--he wants to “reassert the primacy of rational endeavor and objective knowledge in the struggle to save and renew the American Dream.” But the book, however short, is meandering. The unity it does have is made possible not by the “holistic world view held by anthropology” that he claims as a model, but by his own, overgeneralized assumptions: “The majority of the electorate voted for Reagan precisely because they approved of punishing people for being on welfare,” “the hard-core message (of Playboy and Playgirl centerfolds) is that sex does not, need not, should not lead to reproduction.” And so on.

A Leg to Stand On, Oliver Sacks (Harper & Row: $7.95). The story begins when Oliver Sacks steps off an isolated path in Norway to see if he can translate a curious sign. “Beware of the bull!” it says, and as Sacks looks up, satisfied with his success, he sees the real thing, its “great bulbous eyes . . . radiant with malignance.” He begins running “in mad panic,” and soon finds himself at the bottom of a cliff, his leg apparently paralyzed. The forthcoming pages, chronicling Sacks’ efforts to save, feel and stand on the leg, are funny and insightful about the nature of the human psyche during illness. Curiously, though, even after finishing this detailed account, we’re left without a clue about what exactly happened to Sacks’ leg.

Was the paralysis physical? Apparently yes, for during a check-up conducted several years after the accident, doctors discovered “quite severe denervation of the quadriceps, and marked impairment of conduction in the femoral nerve.” Or was it psychological, as Sacks seems to indicate? “The more I gazed at (the leg), and handled it, the less it was ‘there,’ the more it became Nothing--and Nowhere. I had lost the inner image, or representation, of the leg.” Responsible for this confusion is Sacks’ decision to steer clear of physiological explanations, composing, instead, a pastiche of feelings. The decision was not made haphazardly, though, for Sacks believes that without developing a sensitivity toward emotions, neurologists won’t be able to understand the intricacies of the human mind.

Recording Your Family History, William Fletcher (Dodd, Mead: $18.95, hardcover reprint). “Progress” has often been accused of fragmenting the American family--encouraging mobility through the marketplace, condoning divorce and discouraging the oral tradition through the enticements of television. In these pages, the author suggests that progress can provide a solution as well. Videotaped “life history interviews” with parents or grandparents, William Fletcher writes, can bring out “feelings or stories you have never thought about or touched on before.” Fletcher’s overview of the technology is sketchy, but his guide to interviewing, based on his training as an anthropologist, is sensitive and provocative.

Teaching as a Subversive Activity, Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner (Laurel: $4.95). Education reports have been so abundant since student test scores began plummeting in the mid-1970s that American teachers have come to revise an old adage: “Those who cannot teach write books on education.” Like the rest of the literary lot, “Teaching as a Subversive Activity” asserts that our educational system has failed to develop critical, Socratic reasoning skills in students. Unlike many reports calling for a “new approach to education,” though, this book both looks at underlying questions--”Can lessons be relevant and objective?”--and offers practical suggestions about class exercises. The book was first published in 1969, though, and thus very much needs a new preface with the authors’ ideas about why some of their more radical proposals--eliminate tests, courses and requirements--have been forgotten today.

NOTEWORTHY: Natural Shocks, Richard Stern (Arbor House: $6.95). Despite considerable professional success, American journalist Frederick Wursup finds himself living without a foothold in life, struggling, as were many when this novel first appeared in 1978, between confidence and insecurity, light and darkness, seeing and feeling. Flaubert & Turgenev: A Friendship in Letters, Barbara Beaumont, editor (Fromm: $8.95). Notes about literature and politics, aches and pains, attitudes toward work and friends. The Gestapo: A History of Horror, Jacques Delarue (Paragon House: $9.95). A detailed, though not analytical study leading to the conclusion that “the human being is a dangerous wild animal.” “When I hear the word culture ,” says Nazi playwright Hans Johst, quoted in the book, “I load my revolver.”