Word: authors
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...stirred memoirists and biographers ever since. Richard Ellmann's Oscar Wilde will not be the last word on this subject, but it is difficult to imagine a more comprehensive, measured and fascinating account. Ellmann, who died seven months ago of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig's disease), was the author of the landmark literary biography James Joyce (1959). In his numerous books and essays he displayed an acute, doctrine-free sensitivity to the many ways that writers such as Yeats, Beckett, Eliot and Auden translate experience into art. In Wilde, Ellmann confronted a somewhat different challenge: an author whose most...
...also developing educational video disks, and has produced a board game, Global Pursuit, as part of a ten-year program to restore geographic literacy to U.S. schoolchildren. Its steady output of adventure and scientific programming for television will reach more than 100 hours next year. Says C.D.B. Bryan, author of the centennial volume, The National Geographic Society: 100 Years of Adventure and Discovery (Abrams; $45): "The National Geographic is not at all what we remember. It's not the old lady it used...
...want to conduct and comedians who yearn to play Hamlet, thriller writers sometimes show symptoms of hankering after respectability. John le Carre has handled this problem by surrounding his plots with a Jamesian density of details and implications. Now Len Deighton, known to millions of readers as the author of The Ipcress File and Funeral in Berlin, has, temporarily at least, given up suspense altogether...
...works out regularly, but his campaign schedule has curtailed his twice- weekly tennis matches. He still quotes from memory lines from his favorite author, the German writer Hermann Hesse, whose visionary novels (Siddhartha, Steppenwolf, Magister Ludi) describe the quest for enlightenment and serenity. That should be good inspiration for the next President of South Korea...
Most of what passed for life in the Lagers took place in what Levi calls the "gray zone," an area of collaboration with the persecutors that, adds the author, "contains within itself enough to confuse our need to judge." Some jobs brought a prisoner an added ration of soup, perhaps the difference between starvation and survival. Levi absolves the sweepers, kettle washers, night watchmen, lice checkers and bed smoothers, those "who exploited to their minuscule advantage the German fixation about bunks made up flat and square." Mercy is more strained for the Kapos, who were in charge of barracks...