Word: blindness
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...Letters: My Father's Enchanted Period, the last book in Mehta's memoir cycle?collectively called Continents of Exile?concludes the most comprehensive autobiography of the past quarter-century. His topics range from going blind at the age of four to his childhood in Lahore, an education at Oxford, working for the New Yorker, love affairs in India and America, and the trials of house building in Maine. The unifying theme is loss, and the recovery, in unexpected places, of part of what has been lost. Going from his blindness, Mehta adds other privations, such as his bad luck with...
...Mehta's life certainly has the raw material for a great novel: a stark mix of cruelty and grace and the sharp demarcation of light and darkness common to fairy tales. As a boy he is struck blind by meningitis; when he is 13, his country is divided and his family, finding itself in Pakistan, is forced to leave Lahore for India and to start over again. A special program for blind children sends him to America; there, a wealthy woman becomes his patron and sponsors his studies. Mehta's calm, unhurried prose captures the fable-like events...
...that readers skate smoothly upon it?without ever breaking the surface, falling in, and getting lost in his life. What's missing from these memoirs, oddly enough, is evidence of the traits that define him. As a journalist for the New Yorker, Mehta refused to be limited by his blindness; he traveled on assignments with guides who described how things and people looked, and he insisted on going everywhere and "seeing" everything. He wrote essays and books on Oxford philosophy, German theology, Gandhi's fight with his sexuality, the life of the writer R.K. Narayan, and Indira Gandhi's political...
Despite all the devastation, there are hopeful messages in Collapse. In most cases, the problems those extinct peoples faced weren't insoluble; they just couldn't spot the difficulties in time, whether because of cultural blind spots, scientific ignorance or sheer pigheadedness. "We don't need new technologies to solve our problems," Diamond writes, "we 'just' need the political will to apply solutions already available. Of course," he adds, "that's a big 'just.'" With Diamond's help, maybe we'll learn to see our own problems a little more clearly--before we chop down that last palm tree...
...that limited her emotional range. She rarely giggled or shrieked; her voice suggested that she was either disdainful or incapable of severe highs and lows. She wasn't one to spit out rapid-fire dialogue, a vocal reticence that would have limited her roles even in a color-blind Hollywood. Saucy comedy, of the sort Jean Harlow personified, was out, as was the scalding, wiseacre melodrama, Barbara Stanwyck-style. Wong could flash a regal hauteur and, when called for, that sensuality. She could have played grand-dame roles of the sort essayed by Garbo - she certainly could match the Swede...