Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 26, 1995 TAG: 9503290100
SECTION: BOOK PAGE: F-6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
By Richard Critchfield. Doubleday. $27.50
The Villagers, Changed Values, Altered Lives: The Closing of the Urban-Rural Gap.
By Richard Critchfield. Doubleday. $27.50.
Anyone tempted to deny the speed and extent of technology-driven global change would do well to read this powerful account of how deeply life is being disrupted in 10 rural villages on four separate continents.
Critchfield, a widely traveled journalist and winner in 1981 of a MacArthur "genius" Fellowship, has a fine eye for detail and an empathetic talent for comprehending the villagers about whom he writes.
The result is an absorbing, anecdotal account that brings to life the vast changes under way in nations now in various stages of urbanization.
For Americans, much of the book's value lies in the descriptive, village-by-village chapters. Critchfield offers insights into old village ways that, though they've been the pattern worldwide, are less familiar in the United States.
In Critchfield's view, however, American exceptionalism is less than it seems, and hides from us the truth that our urban-based civilization is in trouble not unlike the troubles of countries where urbanization is more recent and is disrupting rural patterns far older than in the United States.
This, anyway, is how I take part of the thesis advanced in his final chapter. Cities, Critchfield argues, cannot survive without countrysides to continually replenish them, with both people and with village-minded attitudes.
He accepts the inevitability of technological change. The old village ways entailed hard physical labor; when humans find a way to ease such toil, they'll take it, regardless of long-range or unforeseen consequences.
But this understanding makes Critchfield all the more pessimistic about the prospects of undoing what he sees as the results of urbanization and the loss of village culture: the breakup of families, the breakdown of social cohesion, and the transformation of rural peasant self-reliance into urban underclass dependency.
- GEOFF SEAMANS
A Tangled Web.
By Judity Michael. Simon & Schuster. $23.
The trouble began in "Deceptions" when identical sisters Sabrina and Stephanie decided to switch identities in the time-honored twin trick. Difficulties really began, however, when Sabrina, living in Illinois as Stephanie received the news that Stephanie, played by Sabrina, had died in an explosion on a yacht in the Mediterranean.
In the beginning of "A Tangled Web," a year later, Sabrina, still posing as Stephanie, lives happily with "her" professor husband and two children. A casual remark by a friend about seeing her double or "ghost" makes Sabrina (Stephanie) travel to France to discover if, somehow, the real Stephanie may still be alive.
Meanwhile in France, to no reader's amazement, Stephanie (Sabrina) is indeed alive but suffering from amnesia. Sudden flashes of memory disturb her and make her doubt her "husband's" and her own memory.
Now, if this confuses you, try to imagine putting the book down for any length of time and then resuming reading!
Lots of glamorous places and people pick up the slack as the sisters gradually draw closer to discovery.
Warning: Don't try this if you're a twin!
- HARRIET LITTLE
Geoff Seamans writes editorials for this newspaper.
Harriet Little teaches at James River High School.
by CNB