Volume 26, Number 1 · February 8, 1979
Terror in Freedonia
By Thomas R. Edwards
Cartel
by Edward Jay Epstein
Putnam's, 316 pp., $9.95
The Carlos Contract: A Novel of International Terrorism
by David Atlee Phillips
Macmillan, 252 pp., $8.95
Death of a Politician
by Richard Condon
Richard Marek, 294 pp., $9.95
Smoke: Another Jimmy Carter Adventure
by Alexander Cockburn, by James Ridgeway
Times Books, 149 pp., $7.95
It's hard not to read reports of public crises and disasters the way we read novels of conspiracy and intrigue. Political upheavals, assassinations and mass atrocity, material shortages and monetary nightmares all invite a paranoid interpretation—somewhere there must be people who are doing this to us on purpose. History unquestionably is conspiratorially manipulated from time to time, but even if it weren't, we would want to think so, hoping against hope that a secularized world can still, however dreadfully, make sense. If the CIA did not exist, it would probably be necessary to invent it, along with International Communism, Zionism, the Mafia, the PLO, the John Birch Society, OPEC, and bankers.
Review, 3162 words
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