Word: authorly
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Texas to Louisiana, biding its time to strike. Towns like Jasper were the refuge for Confederate deserters who fled to the forests after the Civil War. The area became fertile ground for the Klan. "There is a predisposition, a culture over here in East Texas," says John Craig, co-author of Soldiers of God, a new book about America's white supremacists. "It does not express itself all the time, but it is rampant over here." An all-white militia group, he says, operates a 200-acre training facility in the county. Even Kimler acknowledges that "there...
...most people in the Boston area have heard of the new policy restricting use of the Harvard name to identify certain projects or organizations. It's quite a shame that these stipulations don't apply to literature as well. Perhaps this would have encouraged author Pamela Thomas-Graham '85 to consider making some serious revisions to her first novel, A Darker Shade of Crimson. This often misrepresentative book all but circumvents necessary discussion of important racial issues on campus, and it paints high-ranking university officials as one-dimensional puppets at best. Overburdened with persistent and less-than-subtle reminders...
...University comptroller rumored to have vied for Ella's job; Ian McAllister, head of the Economics Department and a staunch opponent of Ella's policies, and Leo Barrett, Harvard's newest president with a past to which only Ella was privy. Diverse though these characters may seem, the author makes little effort to develop their behaviors or idiosyncrasies in either a compelling or interesting way. Each suspect becomes interchangeable with the next, any of whom could have committed the crime. The reader is left bored and impatient in the process...
...problem worthy of further discussion, but, without initiating that discussion, the book's treatment of this problem becomes so diluted as to lose significance. In short, race becomes a subject about which characters can bitch and moan, but not one that the reader can take seriously, regardless of the author's attempts...
...call it, fine. But steer clear of the assessment that A Darker Shade of Crimson accurately exposes the upper echelons of Harvard society. Allow the book to entertain for you what fantasies it will, but don't doubt for a moment that, in her conception of academic life, the author is entertaining a few fantasies of her own as well...