Word: authorly
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...believe that our current writers have strong convictions. Most of them seem to write the literary journalism" popularized in the '60s, minus any anti-establishment impulse. A typical article features some interesting event or person communicated in a "fresh" style that capitalizes on the writerly personality of the author...
There are dangers, but not the ones everyone's talking about, according to Princeton University molecular biologist Lee Silver, author of Remaking Eden (Avon Books). Silver believes that cloning is the technology that will finally make it possible to apply genetic engineering to humans. First, parents will want to banish inherited diseases like Tay-Sachs. Then they will try to eliminate predispositions to alcoholism and obesity. In the end, says Silver, they will attempt to augment normal traits like intelligence and athletic prowess...
...journalists have now done admirable work along the fact-myth continuum of these two cases. Alex Kotlowitz, author of There Are No Children Here, a 1991 best seller about two black boys growing up in a Chicago housing project, spent five years investigating the death of Eric McGinnis. In The Other Side of the River (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday; 317 pages; $24.95), Kotlowitz attempts a kind of narrative mediation, shuttling back and forth across the bridge between the white and black universes--the somewhat gentrified white St. Joseph and the dirt-poor Benton Harbor, with its drug gangs and the highest...
...reaches no conclusion about what caused McGinnis' death, his account is a saddened, sympathetic portrait of two Americas. At the same time, however, the book often seems curiously unmoving and thin, perhaps because it is ultimately inconclusive, perhaps because of a note of self-importance that sometimes falsifies the author's narrative voice...
...take issue with Gray's statement that Morrison is "the author who almost single-handedly gave African-American women their rightful place in American literature." That view heedlessly erases the numerous African-American women writers--Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, Gloria Naylor, Paule Marshall, Audre Lorde, Ntozake Shange, Octavia Butler and Carolivia Herron among them--who, as Morrison's sisters, have brilliantly contributed to contemporary African-American letters. THOMAS GRAVE Providence...