Word: atwoods
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...glaring controversy was the javelin competition, which began a little after 5 p.m., when the spear throwers complained that a fellow could lose his Olympics in the sun. Duncan Atwood noted, "It was sort of like having a flash go off in your face just as you released." Mel Durslag, a Los Angeles historian for the Herald Examiner, recalled that similar worries were heard in 1958 when the Dodgers wanted to put home plate in the Coliseum's east end. A man from nearby Arcadia proposed floating a giant balloon over the west rim, thereby shading the batter...
...references to the Communist boycott, Atwood added, "If I win a medal [in the Olympics], I should mail it to the East Germans, who really deserve it. I probably wouldn't do anything that extreme, but that's where my sentiments...
...verbal panache fool you. Atwood is usually dead serious; serious and getting more so as the years go on as she adds political causes such as Amnesty International to her original crusades against sexism and parochialism. "When you begin to write, you deal with your immediate surroundings," she explains in the introduction; "as you grow, your immediate surroundings become larger. There's no contradiction." Her most weighty essays, "The Curse of Eve" and "An End to Audience?" perceptively and persuasively detail two of her major concerns: the steady worsening of the publishing and distributing industries as ways to disseminate serious...
...author's evident flexibility of diction is another such pleasure. Atwood can range with ease from the academically highbrow to the high-school casual. Even this talent comes under self-satire from time to time, as in "Writing the Male Character...
Such concerns, no matter how jokily narrated, are anything but funny. Atwood demands a response not in terms of philosophy but in the context of the reader's own life; she offers her "far from comprehensive" list of female role models, which covers nearly four pages, and confronts the reader with the choice: which one will you create, or be? Or will you fight, too? As a call to battle, this voice is, perhaps, the best one can imagine...