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Zane Kotker's 
WHITE RISING

The author of Bodies in Motion and A Certain Man gives us a historical novel on the highest level- about 17th century New England and King Philip's War, the first of America's "Indian Wars," as it was experienced by the colonists, by the Indians, and by the Indian leader whom the English called King Philip

"A stirring historical novel"
-Publishers Weekly

The New Yorker says:
"Zane Kotker's ambitious effort to describe the war from the inside (or, rather, from both insides) is entirely successful."

"A marvel!"
says Johanna Kaplan
"She writes with extraordinary grace and lyrical passion...Powerful, original...A rare and radiantly beautiful novel."

"The way it really was,"
says Alvin M. Josephy, Jr.
author of The Indian Heritage of America
"I don't think I know of any book dealing with past Indian-White relations that comes anywhere near as close to making the reader feel that this is the way it really was like for the people on both sides."

"Splendid!" writes Dee Brown

$11.95 Published by Knopf

Photo: Copyright Kelly Wise

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separation of man from the rest of creation.  The most familiar example of this set of associations is Genesis: Eve "saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes." When she and Adam had eaten the fruit, "the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked." Mr. DiStasi argues that "there evidently exists in human consciousness a deeply felt conviction that a primal separation took place, and the eye is its symbol or agent."
From here he moves on to a darker and eventually moonier argument about the connection of mal occhio with "pre-oedipal dynamics" and the "subterranean residues of mother-goddess worship." Mr. DiStasi somehow makes it sound as if mal occhio, properly understood, might bring us back to a more balanced, "all-embracing vision" of life and put us in touch with our primal selves; "evil eye" is not a silly superstition, then, but a reminder of cosmic meaningfulness. Unfortunately, his argument is untethered by his ecstatic prose, and many post-Oedipal readers will remain unconvinced.


Gorky

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ern art itself.
"What emerges from this study," Mr. Rand writes, "is a picture of the artist quite as remarkable as previous studies have supposed, but different in every regard from the critical biases of the last 30 years. Gorky stands revealed as thatrarest of creatures, a modern history painter; it was his own history that he painted." This is a large and heretical claim, but Mr. Rand supports it with an amazing succession of highly detailed analyses of almost every major work in the Gorky oeuvre. We read these studies with mounting excitement as in one painting and drawing after another what Mr. Rand calls "the hidden agenda of [Gorky's] mature art" is revealed to us.
To understand this "hidden agenda," one needs, of course, to know something about the melancholy life that formed the very substance of Gorky's art. It was certainly an extraordinary life, even among the artists of his time, and it was made all the more bizarre by what Mr. Rand describes as "Gorky's penchant for dissembling." About his life, Gorky - to be blunt about it - lied a great deal, and about the art that recorded his life he also lied, deliberately obscuring the sources that were essential to its creation. For that was what modernist art at the highest levels seemed to him to require, and Gorky - no less than his admirers - was determined to have his art perceived as something wholly free of the intensely personal materials to which it was inseparably bound.
He was born Vosdanik Manoog Adoian in 1904 in the village of Kharkom on the Dzore River in Turkish Armenia, and passed his early years in the "climate of terror," as Mr. Rand correctly describes it, that resulted from the wholesale slaughter of the Armenian population by their Turkish rulers during World War I. Gorky's father had already left Armenia for America in 1908, in order to escape conscription into the Turkish army, and his beloved mother, to whom he was very close, died of starvation in 1919 at the age of 39. One of Gorky's sisters recalled that he did not begin to speak until the age of 5 or 6. "His first word," Mr. Rand writes, "was a nonsense word that later became the title of a painting: 'Alkoura.'"
Gorky and his younger sister Vartoosh came to America in 1920, and lived for a time with their older sister Akabe, who had preceded them here, in Watertown, Mass. He settled in New York in 1925, at the age of 20, and it was then that he took the name Arshile Gorky. Arshile is a variant of Achilles, and Gorky - meaning in Russian "the bitter one" - was already a famous name. In one of the many myths that the painter began to weave about his past, he claimed to be Maxim Gorky's cousin. He also later claimed to have studied with Kandinsky in Russia. (The truth seems to be that he was largely self-taught.) From that outset he was eager for celebrity and distinction, and never hesitated about associating himself with exalted names.
His talent was recognized straightaway. When, upon arriving in New York, Gorky enrolled in the Grand Central School of Art, its director - Edmund Graecen - promptly put him to work teaching a sketch class. Yet his life as an artist had scarcely begun when the Wall Street crash of 1929 reduced him to the direst poverty. For several years he lacked money to buy paints and produced only drawings. A place in the Mural Division of the Federal Art Project gave him more of a foothold in 1935, and he actually produced a mural entitled "Aviation: Evolution of Forms Under Aerodynamic Limitations" that was once installed in Newark Airport. He sold his first picture to a museum - the Whitney in New York - in 1937.
By that time he was already part of the growing movement in New York to create a modernist art that could stand beside its counterpart in Europe, but he was still very far from achieving this himself. Gorky's self-imposed apprenticeship to the great European modernists - first Cézanne, then Picasso, then Miró and others - was so protracted, and the mature development of his own art so long deferred, that he seemed to many observers at the time to be an artist permanently fated to imitate the works of others. It wasn't until the 1940's that he produced a body of work recognizably his own. His first one-man show did not take place until 1945, only three years before his death.
The traumas of Gorky's childhood and the hardships of the Depression era turned out to be but a prologue, however, to the misfortunes that beset his final years - the very years, oddly enough, when he was producing the pictures that have won him a permanent place in the history of art. These misfortunes mounted to a tragic climax in the series of catastrophes that swamped him in the last two years of his life. In February 1946, a fire in his Connecticut studio destroyed much of his recent work. Three weeks later, Gorky was discovered to have cancer. A colostomy was performed, and since the artist still had little money, it had to be paid for by friends and the surgeon took two paintings for his services.
As if all this weren't enough to destroy the man, his marriage - which had earlier been a source of considerable happiness to him - began to disinte-