A Strapless Evening Gown

Any book that sets out to prove what was previously axiomatic had better be pretty strong on logic. A Stress Analysis of a Strapless Evening Gown annoyingly attempts to prove that scientists are human. Scientists may be reassured that they are human by the preface to this book, but non-scientists ought to remain unconvinced. All that A Stress Analysis demonstrates is that scientists can laugh or be laughed at, which argument confers the status of humanity equally upon hyenas.

Fortunately, the thirty-two essays in A Stress Analysis are neither so fatuous nor so foolish as the preface. Some are funny. In his autobiographical notes, Einstein wrote that "the essential in the being of a man of my type lies precisely in what he thinks and how he thinks, not in what he does or suffers." Scientific humor is mostly about their thought and the products of it: lot of it is word play. public: the comedy is over. Too bad that we have ended up in Hell."

To those who have enjoyed the sensationalism of The Shark and the Sardines, this volume may prove somewhat of a disappointment. It is a little less exciting to read and in a sense, terribly convincing. The rhetoric and stinging satire are still present, but now the generalizations are not quite as sweeping, the attacks and conclusions not quite as unbelievable. In this book, one need not agree whole-heartedly with Arevalo in order to admit that he has some vital points to make. Fidel Castro's rise to power and the Panama Canal crisis are far less shocking when one realizes that Arevalo's arguments have been read widely in Latin America for many years.

Anti-Kommunism in Latin America is more respectable than The Shark and the Sardines. It is surprising to find acknowledgements at the end of chapters this time; every assertion cannot be accounted to Arevalo-the-madman exclusively.

Irresponsibility has far from disappeared from the present volume, however. Inexcusably, Lyle Stuart has publicized the book in huge New York Times advertisements as the "real truth about Latin America" which can be told at last. It may sell almost as well as The Shark and the Sardines.

Arevalo's writing is turgid, and his often-undocumented charges still become tiring. The real truth about Latin America is not so apparent