Word: author
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...author is a student at the John F. Kennedy School of Government...
Without a false drop of sentimentality, the author lets Father Conroy die as he lived: an absurd misfit. Power can afford the risk, and not just because he is so brilliantly in control of his story. In his Irish bones, he knows something that many writing contemporaries do not understand: that failure is, in fact, the natural state of man. Converting chronic self-pity into the beginnings of self-awareness, Power proves himself, if not quite a tragedian, at least a master alchemist at producing final honor from final defeat...
...bank in the city's ghetto. Like so many other aspects of the black world, the numbers operation is an inverted form of a white institution, the solid local business community. It, too, boosts the economy and shapes the ghetto's social and political structure. For the author, a former waiter, it further serves as an arena for playing off characters who embody multiple visions of the Negro destiny...
...profound. All Pharr's characters are destroyed in one way or another, even Blueboy. "We made a terrible mistake," he says on his deathbed. "We forgot that white folks is still here. We forgot we was operating in America." Less totally true than it once was, perhaps, the author's inescapable moral still seems timely enough: crime may sometimes pay, but being black never does...
...satirist by preying on such vulnerable chickens as the academic life, extramarital affairs, Los Angeles as nightmare, sociology as pseudo science, and flying-saucer cultism as false religion. As a subject, Miss Lurie's minor lady writer is not exactly a meal-in-itself, although the author again demonstrates her special skill at killing swiftly, cleanly and coldbloodedly...