Word: authors
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...author's own disbelief seems not to be wholly suspended in this drowsy, amiable thriller about the German Occupation of Britain's Channel Islands during World War II. The narrative is full of cinematic echoes. There is a real Field Marshal Erwin Rommel and a fake ("Heini Baum, Jewish actor and cabaret performer from Berlin and proud of it"), both of whom suggest James Mason in the title role of The Desert Fox. There is an Allied intelligence agent living hazardously as a German officer; Christopher Plummer lounged through just such a role in Hanover Street. A heartbreakingly young...
Ribman, the author of Journey of the Fifth Horse and Cold Storage, has conjured up the Richelieu, a baroque spa somewhere in the mountains of Europe, and he has populated it with a selection of guests who have the cultural and ethnic diversity of a World War II movie bomber crew: the French gigolo; the Levantine low-life; Mimosa Klein, the Jewish poet from Wellesley; and more, including Cesare Bottivicci, the Italian mutant prognosticator. The physical and emotional excess of these characters matches their surroundings, particularly the immense sweet table itself, laden with creamy goodies and attended by bewigged...
...first work in the ART's series, The End of the World with Symposium to Follow by Arthur Kopit, was a recent Broadway flop inexplicably revived so that it could make an even more spectacular belly-flop here in Cambridge. Now Ronald Ribman, author of a number of underproduced plays, gets his chance to bore audiences with a work that is pretentious, muddily written, and as meaningful as a Spam commercial...
Doris Kearns Goodwin needs no prodding. Her generational saga pays generous tribute to the near silent partners in Irish-American history's most important , merger. She offers little that is new and no shocks. If anything, Goodwin, author of Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream and the wife of former Kennedy Speechwriter Richard Goodwin, softens the impact of the familiar political and sexual scandals that litter the path from the old sod to the Oval Office. Her approach is to balance the requirements of scholarship (Goodwin was a professor of government at Harvard) with the demands of the literary marketplace...
...author overextends herself when she tries to occupy the high critical ground. She judges J.F.K. as deficient in the kind of courage celebrated in Profiles: "the willingness to risk position, power, career for the sake of some abiding conviction." But she also argues that Kennedy was a strong leader because he was "unobstructed by ideological preconception." She is on much firmer ground when sticking to her own preconception, an alluring vision of history as romance...