|
|
|
Sign-off for the
Old Met: The Metropolitan Opera Broadcasts, 1950-1966, Paul
Jackson, PhD '67, Amadeus Press, 1997; $49.95 (music). |
|
 Live Saturday afternoon radio
broadcasts of Metropolitan Opera performances began in 1931. Sponsored
by Texaco, the show became an institution, offering countless listeners
their first exposure to the world of opera. New York's original Met was
razed in 1966, but the venerable broadcast carries on from the new
Lincoln Center. Jackson's 660-page chronicle, a sequel to his 1992
volume covering 1931-1950, is partly a retrospective of 200
performances. Dean emeritus at Drake University, Jackson writes
critiques that are frank but good-humored, whether tut-tutting over a
tenor's "quaint bleat" or applauding a diva's "ironclad top tones." The
book and its 100-plus photographs also recreate the controversial
management of Rudolf Bing: the hirings and firings and legendary feuds
with such singers as Maria Callas and with the broadcast's
producers.
|
|
Over the next nine years, some $7 billion will
be spent on stadiums and other facilities for professional sports
teams, according to Noll, the Morris M. Doyle Centennial Professor of
Public Policy, and Zimbalist, an economics professor at Smith College.
The 15 essays in this collection include case studies from Cincinnati,
Baltimore and San Francisco. Co-authors of three of the essays, Noll
and Zimbalist calculate the average subsidy from a host city to its
sports team at $10 million a year. They don't mind taxpayers footing so
much of the bill--but they dispute claims that ever-better ballparks
are a boon to the local economy.
Twenty-six years ago, Ornstein's
best-seller The Psychology of Consciousness unleashed a flood of
interest in the specialized functions of the two sides of the brain.
The left side was supposed to be strictly rational. The right was
thought to possess untapped power for creativity. In this new book, the
Los Altos psychologist revisits the subject and finds that many of the
early discoveries he reported have been exaggerated, misinterpreted and
misapplied. Improved brain-scanning techniques and more recent studies
on people with damaged brains have led to new findings. It turns out,
for example, that the right hemisphere plays a previously unknown role
in language. Ornstein concludes that the right side is the key to
"developing the overall meaning of life's situations: the large view,
or a higher organization of events."
"Adventure is a personal matter," Noland
writes in his introduction. It is also apparently a matter of business.
An estimated 15 million Americans spent roughly $8 billion on adventure
travel in 1996. Noland writes about adventure trips, ranging from a
trek through the jungle in search of the Yanomamo Indians of Venezuela
to an exhausting horseback ride across the bleak vastness of Genghis
Khan's Mongolia to a walk across England, where the greatest danger is
impalement "or what have you" on the occasional barbed-wire fence. He
has rated the trips from one to five: One represents "couch potatoes
welcome," and five is an in-your-face "if you have to ask, you probably
can't do it." With practical advice on tour companies and recommended
reading at the end of each chapter, Noland seems to have all his
"what-have-yous" covered.