Word: authorly
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...disinclination to blame problems on racism does not mean a reduced sense of racial identity. Psychologist Beverly Tatum, author of the recently published Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?, says she often asks her psychology students to complete this sentence: "I am ______." White students tend to answer with personality traits: "I am friendly," "I am shy," etc. Students of color tend to fill in the blank with their ethnicity: "I am black" or "I am Puerto Rican." The foundation for racial identity, Tatum argues, is constructed in adolescence by peer pressure, societal influences and self...
...bracing sense of optimism; three-fourths of the white youngsters believe race relations will get better, as do more than half the black teens (adults of both races are more skeptical). "What we're seeing here is a hidden aspect of the black survival process," says Michael Eric Dyson, author of Race Rules: Navigating the Color Line and a visiting professor at Columbia University's Institute for Research in African-American Studies. "You imagine a reality better than the one in which you presently live. I wouldn't call it optimism; it goes too deep. It's hope. Hope goes...
Writing a sequel to a rare, magical novel can be a dodgy undertaking, and it's not hard to see why. The fine first novel gets done, let's say, because an enchanted story taps the author on the shoulder and titanic characters rage to be let loose. The sequel trundles along, often as not, merely because writer and readers want to spend more time with people they've grown fond of. The forces at work aren't as powerful, and enchantment can be elusive. It could be a letdown, for instance, to learn that Ishmael, rescued by the Rachel...
...four-part saga whose splendid third book (written first) is that most beguiling of all horse operas, 1985's Lonesome Dove. A raunchy, sentimental narration about a couple of old Texas Rangers on a cattle drive, this Pulitzer prizewinner was McMurtry at the absolute top of his form. The author, as much in love with Lonesome Dove as his readers were, contrived a sequel, Streets of Laredo (1993). It was pale and sad because Gus McCrae, one of his heroes, was dead, and the other, Woodrow Call, was old. Then in 1995 McMurtry reached back with a thunderation called Dead...
...core of it is a moody, valedictory view of Southwestern Indians at the time just before and just after the Civil War (which appears only as a distant commotion). Comanche raiding bands in Texas are beginning to starve because whites to the north have slaughtered the buffalo herds. The author develops a couple of minor figures we've met before, the fearsome chief Buffalo Hump and a quizzical tracker named Famous Shoes, who are among the best characters in the entire saga. A mad subplot involving a Central American sadist and a crazed New England scholar is good, chilling...