Word: apologia
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...whole, pimping probably should have as little to say for itself as possible, but Paul Theroux's newest novel makes a provocative case to the contrary. Jack Flowers, an overage American drifter beached in Singapore, tells the tale: the ribald apologia of a do-gooder who makes vice the arena of his somewhat special virtue. By pandering to other people's passions, Jack figures, he has saved "many fellers from harm and many girls from brutes." As for the act itself. Jack is old-fashioned enough to assume that everyone can agree on its proper dimensions...
More significantly, Blackberry Winter raises more questions than it answers about what Mead is like as a person. Though it sketches vivid portraits of her parents, it is singularly uncommunicative about the author herself. Her fairness toward those who caused her suffering is admirable, but a spirited apologia and a bit of justifiable human anger would be more revealing. In fact, Mead's dispassionate recital of events that must have hurt her suggests a lifelong flight from personal feeling, and possibly even from people. One of the book's more revealing passages may be the one in which...
...different fields to which they were committed even while they handled their film chores. Sadly, Sarris hasn't dealt with anything but movies, most of the time in a tone of directorial hero-worship. That he has made a business on the basis of pop culture dreams and apologia is a phenomenon that only a youthful art and industry--just reaching its maturity in America--could support...
...leadership in our history." At week's end, after crowds in Des Moines and Kansas City, Mo., gave him his warmest receptions of the campaign, McGoyern flew on to Eagleton's home town of St. Louis, where he joined his former running mate and delivered a feeling apologia. "If there were mistakes," he said, "they were honest mistakes of the heart." Dropping his strident tones, McGovern spoke eloquently of his vision of the presidency and the nation, of his conception of "the moral leadership worthy of a great people...
...offers a fascinating chronicle of literary figures who espoused, contemplated or tried suicide-Montaigne, John Donne, Cowper, Thomas Chatterton, Dostoevsky, and so on up to Hart Crane and Ernest Hemingway. It is only toward the end that one realizes Alvarez is thesis pushing, that the book is as much apologia as inquiry. His questionable message: the 20th century is the age of death. But, Alvarez argues, because mankind is only numbly aware of this, the risky purpose of the creative writer must now be to force his audience "to recognize and accept imaginatively . . . not the facts of life...