Word: biz
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Every American family, scholars agree, originally came from somewhere else. No wonder that questing for one's origins, personal or ethnic, has become a booming subgenre of the book biz. This sprawling, elegantly written example of the type is by a previous chronicler of the New York Times (The Kingdom and the Power) and the sexual revolution (Thy Neighbor's Wife). Unto the Sons is only marginally autobiographical; in larger measure it is the story of the great wave of Italian immigration that began around the turn of the century, as filtered through one family's experience...
Strewn throughout this story are seemingly gratuitous nods to bits and pieces of popular culture: show-biz celebrities, movies, rock groups. Maynard suggests that her alienated characters suffer the modern ailment of media overload. Toward the end of the novel, the mother of the hired teenage killer speaks: "One minute you're sitting there, reading some article in a magazine all about Tom Selleck or someone, the next thing you know they're putting handcuffs on your son. . .It doesn't feel like your real life, you know? It feels like you're on a show too. Only there...
...vast, tragic empire collapses. The economy constricts painfully. But ordinary life -- and extraordinary life -- goes on. People still write novels and environmental treaties, design solar cells and stage sets, orchestrate symphonies and ad campaigns. They still care about tossing a salad or a baseball superbly. From science to show biz, they exert all the passion, wit, ingenuity, game playing -- and, yes, the ego, venality and damn-fool silliness -- that keep the human enterprise steaming along so entertainingly...
...trio -- and "for seven years," as the front man himself later remembered, "we knocked ourselves out." Cole had begun to sing, he later recalled, "to break the monotony," and by the time they joined Mercer's new label the trio had gone about as far in jazz and show biz as a black outfit could in those days...
CINEMA Bette Midler evokes older, bolder show biz in For the Boys...