Word: authors
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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What makes a medical journalist whose last book was Women and the Crisis in Sex Hormones (1977) spend six years writing a biography of Jacqueline Susann, author of the definitive '60s trash trinity, Valley of the Dolls, The Love Machine and Once Is Not Enough? Perhaps it was Susann's unique amalgam of poignancy and chutzpah. Her pores were too big to pass a screen test, she could not sing or dance, she was too short to be a model and, after 25 years of trying, she was nowhere as an actress. She drank heavily and was addicted to pills...
...Three of Author Walker Percy's five previous novels bear titles with implications of apocalypse: The Last Gentleman, Love in the Ruins and The Second Coming. The other two, The Moviegoer and Lancelot, are exceptions in name only. For all of Percy's fiction revolves around a central question: can humane, civilized life survive this murderous, mechanized century? Details change from book to book, but a number of constants recur. The hero is typically a Southerner and a loner, a weirdo in the eyes of friends and relatives, whose despair at the decline of civilization has lured him into alcoholism...
...human decency that had been woven into the texture of civilized life." Some friends and colleagues remained lockstep Stalinists, and Hook brings them onstage as object lessons. Lincoln Steffens had famously seen the future in the U.S.S.R. and proclaimed that it worked. It was less well known, notes the author, that Steffens "had previously seen it in Italy . . . where he thought it had also worked. His praise for Mussolini was as glowing as for Lenin." Bertolt Brecht told Hook that the status of defendants in the Soviet dock was irrelevant: "The more innocent they are, the more they deserve...
...riding crashed in 1982--and this mode of transportation may help explain why Gardner was never fully accepted by the academic and critical circles of his time. Some critics, citing Gardner's talent for characterizing the physical detail and philosophical outlook of Middle America, classed this medievalist-turned-author among the top American writers of the 20th century. Many others, however, found that beneath a flashy surface humour and topicality, Gardner's works lacked the depth of Ulysses or The Magic Mountain...
Persian Nights shows why. Author Diane Johnson's sixth novel transports a handful of Americans into Iran during the summer of 1978. These remarkably ordinary visitors have no way of knowing they have jetted into a maelstrom, a seething revolution that will soon topple the Shah, rearrange the balances of power and terror in the Middle East and seriously frazzle two successive American presidencies. But in hindsight from 1987, when all of this is known, anyone who was in Iran then, even only in make-believe, can be made to seem interesting...