Word: authority
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Holy Writ Dept: Religious fundamentalism is apparently not yet dead at Harvard. A resident tutor received an overdue notice for a copy of the Vulgate, the Latin version of the Holy Bible penned by St. Jerome. In the space marked "author" was written...
...Walker ascended from the realm of mere literature after Steven Spielberg's film adaptation of her novel The Color Purple. The movie's huge commercial success -- and the controversy that arose over its portrait of black males -- ensured Walker's public renown as a woman with a cause, an author who, when she has a message, would rather write a book than call Western Union. Indeed, her poetry and fiction have always been, to some extent, polemical. Now that her potential audience has increased many times over, Walker, 45, has become more forthright about the burden of her prose...
Brady encircles his outsize subject with equal parts of anecdote and scholarship. He does not attempt the intimate tone of Barbara Leaming's authorized 1983 biography or try for the high-skid finish of Charles Higham's Orson Welles: The Rise and Fall of an American Genius (1985). Citizen Welles covers more ground and digs deeper, revealing an artistic nomad whose life had too many ups, downs and lateral movements to be treated as a sales chart. The author is a great admirer, crediting Welles as an originator of the film noir genre and a technical pioneer whose influence...
...Reynolds, founder of the giant tobacco company, Reynolds enjoyed a privileged prep-school upbringing in Connecticut and Florida. But in the five years since he stubbed out his last cigarette, the sometime TV-and-film actor has become a militant antismoker. Now Reynolds has co-written, with author Tom Shachtman, The Gilded Leaf (Little, Brown; $19.95), a moralistic tale about a fortune built on tobacco and dissipated by reckless heirs. Says Reynolds: "The hand that fed me is the tobacco industry, and that same hand has killed millions of people...
...resulting wealth, says Reynolds, ignited the flames of family ruin. Despite the author's wooden narration, he portrays a cast of heirs straight out of Dynasty: wastrels, alcoholics and eccentrics who became entangled in sordid divorces and murky crimes. Patrick's uncle Smith Reynolds, a daredevil pilot, died of a gunshot wound and was deemed a suicide. The author suggests that his uncle's second wife actually did the deed. Patrick Reynolds rarely saw his father, R.J. (Dick) Reynolds Jr., a chain smoker and heavy drinker who married four times and died at 58 of emphysema...