Lisa Tyler

An Agatha Christie Play—Without the Mystery

Four Hemingway scholars with diverse approaches offer their first impressions of Jane Masons newly published play, Safari.

“Everybody Has It”: Syphilis and the Human Condition in the Writings of Ernest Hemingway

The ubiquitous references to venereal disease in Hemingways writings signal his commitment to literary modernism and the shock of the new. Syphilis, the life-long, potentially fatal illness for which there was no permanent remedy until 1943, became a trope for Hemingway. Again and again, he presents sexually transmitted diseases in general, and syphilis in particular, as the universal human condition. Hemingway sees syphilis as both a concrete medical reality of his time and an iconic form of human suffering, a metaphor for what all humans must eventually endure: suffering for which there is no remedy. He then explicitly links that suffering both to unreasonable and inherently dangerous societal expectations for masculine behavior and to the emotional pain of the depression he repeatedly experienced.

Unbelievable Happiness and Final Sorrow: The Hemingway-Pfeiffer Marriage by Ruth A. Hawkins (review)

It’s difficult to uncover biographical information about Ernest Hemingway that scholars haven’t already mined. His thirteen-year marriage to Pauline Pfeiffer has been addressed in multiple biographies and might seem to have been covered adequately already. But in this exhaustively researched new volume, nearly fifteen years in the making, Ruth A. Hawkins not only reexamines with a fresh sensibility what might initially seem familiar ground, she also offers new anecdotes, revealing quotations from letters both to and from Pauline, and detailed information about the Pfeiffer family and Ernest’s time in Piggott, Arkansas. Moreover, she takes relationships that amount to little more than a paragraph in most of the biographies—for example, Ernest’s relationship with Pauline’s uncle, Gus Pfeiffer, who financed his African safari, or with her sister, Virginia, whom he met (and was attracted to) in Paris when he first met Pauline—and explores them with admirable thoroughness, drawing liberally on unpublished letters, the many biographies, and interviews with family members and friends. As Hawkins convincingly explains in her preface, “I attribute the lack of the attention to the Pfeiffers to two things: (1) they were an extremely private family and did not publicly discuss their relationship with Hemingway, and (2) Pauline had the bad luck to die before Ernest, leaving the slanted picture that he painted of her as her lasting legacy” (ix). Hawkins is openly sympathetic to the much-maligned Pauline, whom Ernest’s biographers (following Ernest’s lead) cast as the relentless “other woman” determined to break up the marriage to his first wife, Hadley, so eloquently celebrated in A Moveable Feast:

The Hemingway Book Club of Kosovo (review)

cumulative strength of these strategies—and the powerful personalities and value systems of the publishers who implemented them—to determine how, when, why, and to what extent Americans would read the authors who today firmly hold positions in the canon of modernism. The book is, indeed, a very significant contribution to recent criticism that dismantles the idea of modernism’s antagonistic relationship with consumer culture in which selling books always means selling out.

Book Reviews : Barton, Laurence. (1993). Crisis in Organizations: Managing and Communicating in the Heat of Chaos. South-Western Publishing Co. ISBN 0-538- 81818. 256 pages

are ideologically-charged and, for the most part, highly polarized topics. Like abortion and gun control, these certainly contain moral issues of considerable significance, but the debate seems more affective than cognitive and, in many instances, it’s genuinely difficult to conduct a rational discussion. Taking Sides is one of a series of more than a dozen similar books by The Dushkin Publishing Group, with other topics ranging from bioethical matters to issues involving education, the environment, and world politics. Newton and Ford are capable editors who have assembled an impressive collection of viewpoints on many important subjects. The problem, as I see it, is that most of the topics represented in this book bear

Book Reviews : Business Communication Today. 3rd ed. Courtland L. Bovee and John V. ThilL New York: McGraw-Hill,1992. 736 pages

In the Preface, Tebeaux explains that composition research on pre-writing and communication research on writing at work have led her to stress business writing in contrast to academic writing, new technologies for writers, and audience analysis. One of the strengths of the text is the extensive end notes for each chapter which with the bibliography provide an excellent summary of much of the relevant scholarship during the last twenty years. This textbook, as the title indicates, emphasizes the role of designing as a prelude to writing. The first of the three sections stresses concepts of communication, followed by a second, longer section on typical business documents, and then by a shorter final section on editing, with appendices on oral presentations and on further readings. The structure emphasizes the importance of planning before writing. The intended audience for the book is &dquo;advanced undergraduates or MBA students&dquo; as well as &dquo;younger undergraduates&dquo;; however, the book is not intended &dquo;as