Short Notices

THE RED CHINESE AIR FORCE EXERCISE, DIET, AND SEX BOOK translated by William Randolph Hirsch. 85 pages. Stein and Day. $2.95.

William Randolph Who? If the preface to this treatise on "dietetical materialism" is to be believed, its translator is an eminent Sinologist born in Canton province, where his parents

"Worked as missionaries specializing in the opium trade" and became famous as the "junk priests." He obtained the manuscript by parachuting into China with the help of a "Francis Gary Powers Traveling Fellowship."

William Randolph Hirsch is really three staffers on Monocle, a New York humor magazine--Marvin Kitman, Victor Navasky and Richard Lingeman. Their book combines a spoof of self-help manuals on how to be thin, agile and potent with a parody of Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung, which after all is also a self-help book. In the Hirsch version of Chinese ideology, eating is as much a bourgeois deviation as making love. The book advances the remarkable theory that "under Communism, sex is work. Under capitalism, work is sex."

On the food front, the slogan is "calories do count, but people don't." This principle is supported by the Chinese Air Force diet--popularly known as "The Sinkiang Man's Diet"--which was first developed in the "Mao Clinic" and was tested by the 19,007th Lighter than Air Fighter Squadron (otherwise known as the "Flying Paper Tigers"). It offers recipes for such dishes as "True Way to Marxist Contentment Soup," and "Sweet and Rotten Pork," all of which consist of rice, fish heads (if available) and radishes. If faithfully followed, the regimen is guaranteed to eliminate not only the dieter's excess flab but the dieter. Meanwhile, Red soldiers are cautioned to "report all fortune-cookie messages to the Security Officer." And so forth.

THE LOOMING SHADOW by Legson Kayira. 143 pages. Doubleday. $3.95.

An honest citizen is unjustly accused of evildoing. An appeal for justice is mismanaged and misunderstood through several layers of bureaucracy. Henchmen of the accuser take matters into their own hands and resolve the issue by violence.

Kafka country? No, contemporary Africa, where injustice and revenge are concrete forces, not metaphors for alienated modern man. The book is set in a village hovering on the brink of civilization, and the topsy-turvy quality of its life is caught so expertly by the author that terrifying and absurd events come to seem fully logical. Studding the story are keenly observed individual portraits, among them a witch doctor frantically clinging to a waning authority and a self-important chieftain who | wears European khakis under his tribal robes.

Seven years ago, when he was 22, Legson Kayira completed a 2,500-mile trek, mostly on foot, from his native Nyasa village to the U.S. consulate at Khartoum, where he asked for and received an opportunity to study in America. Since then he has moved on from Skagit Valley Junior College in Washington State, via the University of Washington, to Cambridge, England. In his autobiography, I Will Try (TIME, April 30, 1965), he told with disarming simplicity how he got there. In this, his first novel, he tells no less appealingly where he began.

SOMETIMES, BUT NOT ALWAYS by James Stevenson. 170 pages. Little, Brown. $4.95.

A fondness for the bizarre characterizes a band of young U.S. writers that includes Donald Barthelme (Snow White) and Jordan Crittenden (Balloons Are Available). They see contemporary life as ludicrous, and their novels are filled with man-made confusion. James Stevenson belongs to this category, though his fictional method is more conventional. The hero of his new book is Joe Roberts, a young gagman who flagellates his brain to produce freelance ideas and sketches for the theater and television, as well as a daily quota of 15 comic ideas that he sells to cartoonists. (Author Stevenson is himself an engaging New Yorker cartoonist.)

Roberts is laboring to meet the expenses of a Connecticut house filled with dogs, children and a harried wife. His sleep is ravaged by a recurring nightmare that Mr. Duell, "the man from the bank," is foreclosing not only the house but his family as well.

In contributing to a television show called So What Else Is New? (SWEIN for short), Roberts becomes involved with a has-been vaudevillian, who is cruelly exploited by TV's masters, and dies. In a glacial finish, Roberts feels somehow responsible for the death, retreats to the town dump and concludes that "we are all going to be obsolete, and thrown away, one day soon." Author Stevenson has combined a sardonic view of showbiz with verbal cartooning that veers into wild hallucination.

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