Word: authorly
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...final note: as the editor-in-chief of a campus publication, I am upset by the irresponsible journalism practiced by Adair as well as The Crimson's editorial staff as demonstrated in this piece. The following are only a few examples. Adair incorrectly identifies the author of the other article mentioned no less than three times. Adair does not use a single quotation to support her accusations of bigotry. The one quotation she does use in a secondary argument appears in 25 point font in the middle of my article in The Salient. As an English concentrator, Adair should understand...
Call and McCrae are the author's unsolved problems. In Lonesome Dove they were amusing middle-aged adolescents, which seemed to be the author's gloss on the American West. This means, however, that in the long present novel they spend many, many chapters not maturing: Gus mooning for his lost Clara, and Woodrow being cold to Maggie, his son's mother. When they turn sideways on stage, they are seen to be band-sawed from plywood, a drawback that at last seems to matter...
Lost Man's River is another kind of troublesome sequel, a second swat at an obsession that has buzzed around the author's head for a decade or more. Killing Mister Watson, published in 1990, was Matthiessen's impressive, exasperating novel about the shooting, in 1910, of a man named E. J. Watson, by a mob of angry townsmen in southwest Florida. Was Watson a hardworking planter and family man who paid his bills and helped his neighbors, or a bar brawler and casual gunman who killed his hired hands rather than pay them at the end of the cane...
...forward, but in doing so withdraws an additional 50 years from the event. Lucius Watson, one of E.J.'s sons, by now an elderly, self-apologetic historian, pokes around, finds the sole credible witness still alive and to some extent sorts things out. The oddity here is that the author cares more about the old shooting than most of the characters seem to. As with the first novel (a necessity for understanding the second), what is first rate is Matthiessen's loving descriptions of wildlife, human swamp dwellers and the interwoven land and water of the coastal islands. A third...
Americans at War (University Press of Mississippi; 200 pages; $28) is a new collection of Ambrose's essays that demonstrates deep knowledge and common sense about mankind's most senseless activity. Its author, whose military experience ended in 1955 after two years of R.O.T.C. at the University of Wisconsin, deftly avoids the punditry and globaloney of armchair adjutants and mediagenic experts...