Word: bookishness
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...WORDS, by Jean-Paul Sartre. After a series of increasingly labored, metaphysically morose works, Sartre has written a clear-eyed, warm, but very sad account of his early years. The despair of modern existentialism, it turns out, is partly rooted in the struggle for sanity of a bookish, lonely child...
...sons-pompous, bookish Blaine Shelby, 33, and happy-go-lucky 14-year-old Sam-tell the story in alternate chapters. Angelina Hughes, a beautiful hoyden in love with Blaine, disguises herself as a soldier and fools everyone but perspicacious Sam, who stumbles upon her bathing nude in a river. Among the good guys are O'Hara, an Irish sergeant with a heart of gold; Hobbs, a sly, tall-tale-telling frontiersman; Spie-buck, a 6-ft. 4-in. Shawnee guide; and shrewd, Lincolnesque Colonel Alex Doniphan. The bad guys are legion, ranging from scoundrelly Mexicans to brash American bullies...
...Shawn, life changed forever in 1910. A pious, bookish student at the University of Denver, he was studying to be a Methodist minister when an attack of diphtheria left him paralyzed from the waist down. Ballet lessons were prescribed to aid his recovery. Private therapy was one thing. But dancing in public? When Shawn actually danced a waltzy pas de deux at an arts ball, faculty members were shocked and fraternity brothers sniggered. "Men," he was quietly informed, "don't dance." Shawn quit the university, and has viewed his art ever since as a logical "continuation of my sense...
...naturally none of the self-divided souls around him can tolerate so much indivisible virtue. The towns people are feuding with him because he won't join a logging strike (this may be the only novel about workingmen in which the strikers are villains), and his bookish young half brother, Lee, is trying to break...
Would-be summer wonks had better skip the Loeb production of "Love's Labour's Lost." Otherwise, like Ferdinand of Navarre, they might realize the folly of spending one's life in bookish pursuits and come to bemoan those "barren tasks, too hard to keep--Not to see ladies, study, fast, not sleep...