Word: bookings
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...also manipulative. Kingston's book aims for as many allusions per page as James Joyce, but she avoids becoming a nuisance by putting the allusions in the mind of Wittman and treating them all but seriously...
LOOK at the book's opening sentence: "Maybe it comes from living in San Francisco, city of clammy humors and foghorns that warn and warn--omen, o-o-men, o dolorous men, o dolors of omens--and not enough sun, but Wittman Ah Sing considered suicide every day." This phrase could be the bad opening of a bad novel, the unwieldy preface to an overbearing descriptive work, the sort of thing the Surrealists objected to in their first manifesto. Except, in this case it is intentional...
...work since existentialism. What Wittman does and says is not original. Even his dream--of writing an epic play that would weave together Chinese novels and tales about the famed monkey who brings back Buddhist scripts from India--is based on others' thoughts. And nothing really happens in the book; the drama is practically irrelevant...
Ackermann says she also tried to avoid the chches of political memoirs. "I wanted to write the kind of book that I would like to read," she says. "I used a lot of dialogue and worked up to a climax because you have to be kind to your reader...
...book's most prominent theme is city officials' difficulties in getting things done. In a place like Cambridge, simple problems such as establishing bicycle lanes can take years to implement and then fail...