Word: ackroyd
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Dershowitz's presentation will follow a reading of Starr's report by actors David Ackroyd and Tracy B. Swope. In a media release, Dove Audio promises that the Ackroyd-Swope rendition will not dramatize the lengthy and often salacious material submitted by Starr...
Only a foolhardy or a thoroughly self-confident novelist would risk such a potential yawn inducer, and Peter Ackroyd decidedly belongs in the second category. The author of biographies of T.S. Eliot and Charles Dickens and of seven earlier novels, including The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde and Chatterton, Ackroyd has moved skillfully and often between the provinces of fact and fiction, with particular attention paid to the muzzy, fuzzy border between the two. By the time the historical Marx and Gissing and the imagined Cree sit together in silence in the Reading Room, the books they choose not only...
...Ackroyd unfolds and eventually provides a solution for these crimes through a succession of short chapters and shifting points of view. Much of the attention goes to a woman once known as Lambeth Marsh Lizzie, who escaped poverty by way of the London music halls, giving innocent performances of suggestive songs: I Don't Suppose He'll Do It Again for Months and Months and Months; Don't Stick It Out So Much. Under the tutelage of Dan Leno, London's most beloved comedian and a precursor of Charlie Chaplin, Lizzie became a star and eventually married the newly rich...
What this introductory execution has to do with the Limehouse murders is, essentially, the question and plot of the novel. Unfortunately, this malange of fiction and fact is longer on intellectual pleasures than emotional resonance. Ackroyd has Dickensian ambitions and tries to show a city full of interlocking coincidences leading inexorably to tragedy. He does so with considerable skill but untimely haste. The intricacies of his plot seem ultimately to trace vectors rather than lives...
...next night I attended Orpheus, a brand-new parade of brand-new krewe that my godfather had helped to found. (Some guys named Harry Connick Jr. and Dan Ackroyd also played a part, but who cares about them?) Orpheus is a replacement for one of the three krewes that stopped marching a few years ago when a city ordinance ordered that any krewe using public facilities for parades had to integrate...