cover image Somerville and Ross: 2the World of the Irish R. M.

Somerville and Ross: 2the World of the Irish R. M.

Gifford Lewis. Viking Books, $19.95 (288pp) ISBN 978-0-670-80760-4

The Anglo-Irish world popularized in the PBS-TV series The Irish R.M. was the world of the two people who wrote about it, Edith Somerville and Violet Martin (the pseudonymous Martin Ross). Cousins born into the Anglo-Irish gentry, they embarked on a joint writing career, unusual for women in the late 19th century. Their enormously popular stories juxtaposed the comic and the serious, capturing the dialect of the servants who ministered in the vast, drafty houses of their ""betters.'' Even after Martin's death in 1915, Somerville continued to list her cousin's name as collaborator. This unique relationship is here explored in letters, diaries and photographs that not only limn the separate and entwined lives of two talented women but also illumine a vanished world. Lewis, a British writer, has previously published books on Scots and Irish genealogy and paleography. (May 6pThis is a compilation of interviews on corporate ethics conducted by Freudberg for National Public Radio. From twin perspectives of Watergate-related and other business scandals in the 1970s and of the growing employee-and-public participatory mode of American enterprise, these interviews explore in depth, and at great length, the reexaminations of social values and evolving reform experienced by such disparate firms as Lockheed, Johnson & Johnson, Sun Company, Levi Strauss and RCA. The discussions of public safety, environmental concerns, employee motivation, layoffs, community relations, etc., reveal uncertainties among managers on the specifics of ethical norms. At the same time, the reader perceives an expanding industrial awareness of individual worth and social rights as ingredients of corporate success. (April 22)