Word: almost
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...contrast, there is almost nothing of a revealing and striking honesty in Living in Hope and History. In most of her speeches and essays, Gordimer settles for platitudes and truisms rather than incisive commentary. Of course, in two or three of these selections, we do get some flashes of the uncompromising clarity of moral vision that is apparent in her best fiction: but these glimpses of Gordimer at her best only serve in this context to accentuate the reader's disappointment in the rest of the compilation. In 1959: What is Apartheid?, a transcript of a seminar given in Washington...
...right track: it is this kind of truth that is meaningful to the writer of fiction, truth to the spirit. The problem is, this is also the kind of truth that needs to be important to the writer of the kind of nonfiction which Gordimer attempts. It is almost pointless to write journalism about the future of literature, or about the evolution of a truly democratic South Africa, that does not somehow strike a new chord in the reader. Gordimer manages to cover the most emotionally intense period in her country's history in a way that is factually true...
...Each scene becomes more and more reflective of a cinematic game, as the men fight from summer to fall with individual deaths meaning little. Lee's fade-outs to nature are beautiful portraits of the rich Missouri countryside, yet he is almost too proud of his ability to capture these scenes on film. While he tries to establish a distinction between active battle and quiet days at camp, each fade-out is one more step away from the film's chance to redeem itself with a coherent story line. Hints of Lee's genius as a director do show...
...Deborah Wojcik's paintings of small boys are set apart from the other pieces by their neatly stylized, almost commercial execution; they are a smart treatment of issues of self-presentation that are usually seen only in the feminine inflection. Like most any group show, "Salon" is uneven and loose; however, it contains samples of compelling, skillful and surprisingly mature work...
Diseases like malaria and yellow fever, which almost never occur in the U.S., are everyday occurrences in many underdeveloped countries where, because of poverty, standards of sanitation and public health are lacking...