Commentary : Orange County's Worst Oil Spill Should Become a Learning Situation By Robert F. Gentry, and Robert F. Gentry is a city councilman and former mayor of Laguna Beach. He serves on the executive committee of the Southern California Assn . of Governments and the governor's Local Government Advisory Committee on Offshore Development.
Who Says Any Writer Can't Try Fiction? By Norman Cousins, Cousins, former editor of The Saturday Review of Literature, has written or edited a number of books on literary subjects, including "Writing for Love or Money," "The American Essay," "March's Thesaurus--Dictionary" and the foreword to "The Cambridge Guide to English Literature." His new book is "Head First: The Biology of Hope."
What We Don't Tell the Children By Jimmy Santiago Baca, From "Black Mesa Poems" (New Directions: $8.95, paper; 144 pp.; 0-8112-1102-9). Having taught himself to read and write while serving a prison term, Santiago Baca is now a full-time writer and lives with his wife and two children on their ranch in New Mexico. "Black Mesa Poems"--written in English but moving into Spanish, as in the poem above, at crucial moments--deals with the lives (and sometimes the deaths) of Chicanos in the American Southwest. 1989, Jimmy Santiago Baca. Reprinted by permission of New Directions .