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...ability to appreciate the comedic aspects of any great novel can expose new dimensions of a book??s complexities. An author can often reveal invaluable insights into a character’s personality through humorous details about his comic foibles or silly idiosyncrasies. Humor can be used equally well to humanize or ironize a character. But while the specific literary effects of humor vary from book to book, comedy serves as a surprisingly perceptive avenue to examine many novels...
...strength of “Mean Free Path” lies in its air of intimacy. The subjects of the poems range widely from the most quotidian matters—the act of looking up from reading a book??to the gravest ones—the death of a friend. By including the trivial alongside the serious, Lerner creates the illusion of conversation with a close friend. He writes, “I want this to be... a little path / For Ari... That’s why I speak / In a voice so soft...
However, Goodman’s sources betray the murkier moral landscape of the era of high imperialism—the book??s subtitle, “One Man’s Battle for Human Rights in South America’s Heart of Darkness,” makes explicit allusion to Joseph Conrad’s famous novella, especially apt given the fact that Conrad and Casement met in 1889 in the Congo Free State. Casement’s own description of Arana recalls “the unseen presence of victorious corruption” that Marlow senses...
Goodman’s account of these events is commendably clear, but he often presents the story and its characters in reductively simple terms. As the book??s title suggests, Goodman frames Casement’s clash with Arana as a battle between good and evil, between defenders and abusers of human rights, between heartfelt humanitarianism and ruthless capitalism. This is, to an extent, justified, given the enormity of the crimes committed against the native population of Putumayo by the Peruvian Amazon Company in the name of Europe’s ever-increasing demand for rubber...
Among American novels, maybe only Huckleberry Finn rivals Catcher in the Rye in luring readers to imagine the young character’s "life" that follows the book??s end. Twain teasingly ventured in his autobiography that Huck became "a justice of the peace in a remote village in Montana and was a good citizen and greatly respected." An essayist in Time conjured Holden at 40 as a Columbia alum who left his PR job to become a country club golf pro; divorced and remarried with two daughters, he ended up teaching at a prep...