If the high priests of American society are its white-robed doctors, with their seeming power of life and death over the rest of us, Dr.
Irving Oyle is a renegade urging us to reclaim our power to take responsibility for our own health.

I have just returned to the great grogginess capital of the universe and thought I would type you all a quick line. I pray that I am accepted at a good school — this Florida living is pretty lousy — the statements technically should be unrelated but the typewriter has an intoxicating effect upon the novitiate typist, not unlike the voice of a soothing therapist beseeching free association.

When I was young I turned a corner and there was Norman Mailer; some other kid turned a corner and there was Nabokov. Life gives you what you get and that’s that. At times I would have preferred getting someone else. When I saw Mailer on the Dick Cavett show a couple of years ago insisting that he pushed Gore Vidal across a room farther than Vidal had pushed him, I really wished I had gotten someone else; I mean, would Nabokov argue on the Dick Cavett show? Would he even appear on Merv Griffin’s? And I’m not talking about a love-affair with Mailer’s writing either. God knows that if he can’t write badly, he can write mediocre books, middling enough to make you ashamed of your admiration. Still, Mailer knows what shame is. Now that’s a marvel!

“Biological sisters!” she roared at me. “Do I have a story for you!”

In Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her, Susan Griffen explores the connection between feminism and ecology by tracing Patriarchy’s attitudes toward women and nature throughout Western history. These attitudes view women and nature as matter, inert and passive, therefore subject to the restless dominating activity of male prerogative. Ms. Griffen, a poet, traces this view through Western science, philosophy, religion, ecology, female history and feminism.